GerdTalks Episode 3 Futurist Gerd Leonhard: Future of Meta/Facebook Social Media KEYNOTE (Audio)

Hi, I'm Gerd Leonhard Futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. Welcome to Gerd Talks, my new bi weekly video and audio talk show about the future. Let's dive right in. So really, what's happening on my end when I look at social media? This is the topic, right? Why do we need to think about what's happening with Facebook, AKA Meta, and how can we reboot social media to be more positive? First, I want to say, just to kick the whole thing off, this is not a black or white scenario. There's many great things about social media and I'm a great fan of social media and a great user, except for Facebook. And so really we have to kind of get away from this idea that it's about good or bad technology. Technology is as good as we use it. It's more than neutral until we use it. And the same goes for Facebook. So social media does have lots of benefits. I'm a fan, but many things have gone seriously wrong. And I think I want to start by saying we have to reject the binary, this concept of saying, is it all good, is it all bad? That is just not going to work here. The concept of good or bad can be applied for many things, but not to social media, not to technology. So let's think a little bit further. When we think about this, I think what really happened is Facebook and now Meta went through a process of becoming toxic, becoming evil, becoming unethical, and probably not an intended process either, and not one that they will enjoy. Look at the stock market performance in the last two weeks, really, this is what happened. Social media went from this idea of being magic, manic then, and toxic. Magic is the fact that we can do this. I mean, we can express ourselves, we can meet people. And then manding is when we get obsessed with doing it all the time. It's like food or any other drug really for that matter. And this kind of idea of toxic when we are repressed by technology, and this is doubtlessly happening right now, poisoning our democracy, poisoning the way that we perceive reality and distorting our reality. I think this is a very, very bad idea and it has gone too far. And we have to detoxify Facebook, Meta and other social media course. Great quote here from Buckminster Fuller who said humanity is acquiring all the right technology for the wrong reasons. And that is so appropriate to the Facebook and Meta discussions. Great technology, great AI, great a lot of things, but for the wrong reason. And the reason of Facebook to exist is to sell advertising and to track us and to provide data to the nsa parenthesis. There may be sort of a backdoor reason. Basically, what's happening is that our main problem is this. Our main problem is that it's about algorithm. It's algorithmic media. How can you expect something that is made by a machine to make a lot of sense for humans? I mean, basically, yeah, the machine is getting smarter, but algorithmic media is not media. It's essentially an engine. And what we see on Facebook is it's contorted in a hundred different ways. I stopped using Facebook five years ago after making a long debate about this, and I lost 74% of my traffic on my website because I was good with the algorithms. But nevertheless, I think it's a bad way to think about media. It's not enough. I think we need to go further than this because Facebook clearly was kind of or is a money machine. It's mostly about generating revenues in some sort of algorithmic fashion. And look at the numbers here. It's astounding, right? So 2021 revenues 170 billion, which translates to 320 million per day, if I do the math right. And some people have estimated that basically the estimated profit is $160 million per day. That is the profit. I mean, this company is more powerful than many other countries. In fact, it is a country, the Zooks country. And the final one is also kind of great. $163,000 average salary per year. And of course, many engineers and stuff make millions on Facebook. Nothing wrong with that when you work hard. But think about the economic proportions that we see here. So in many ways, I always say what's happening here is that we used to have problems with big oil polluting the world, and now we have a problem with digital pollution, basically big tech, mostly big social, causing the same problems, digital pollution. And that's actually a much bigger problem than the problem of big oil because we're solving the climate change problem and we're switching to decarbonized ways of doing this. But with technology, we haven't gotten around to this yet. We're essentially polluting everything around us is spoiling the atmosphere between people, literally through social media. This animation we did about four years ago, it's a great animation that I love because it's not just Facebook that's essentially creating externalities, external things to their business model that they don't care about. And I think this is dead wrong. We have to care about the side effects of what we're doing and the side effects of too much technology. Too much media is the Violation of user principles. It's tax avoidance, it's addiction, it's bias, it's manipulation, all of those nice things. But, you know, the stance has been from companies like this, technology companies and social media is to say, well, let somebody else worry about it. But that's not possible when you have 3 billion users. Exponential growth and power results in exponential problems, externalities, and we have to face them. And I think Mark and his team is trying to face them, but are they actually interested in going to the root of the problem? And I think this is the problem. When we look at Facebook Traditionally, Facebook 2012, remember that Mark told everybody on the team, move fast and break things. That was the paradigm of Facebook. What do we have today? Well, today the paradigm is this, right? Basically move faster to get away from the things that we've broken. And that is metaverse. We're going to move fast, do something else, because we've burned everything else. And this is a very bad strategy in my view. And it's irresponsible, it's unethical, and it's what I call permissionless hyper innovation. No permission, no supervision. Lawmakers catching up is basically detrimental to society. And that responsibility lies, of course, with the leadership and with Mark. You know, having 3 billion users is not like we can just pull the plug. You know, I mean, I left, but under what cost? We can discuss later what that means. So very, very important thing here as we're moving into this future. There's sort of a trust line that Facebook has been crossing all the time. And everywhere I looked at this the other day, I couldn't even get it on one screen. You know, like 300 instances, Facebook has crossed the trust line with impunity. Here's a little scrolling thing I did, if I waited for that to go to the end of the page, would be here tomorrow evening. So it's a huge thing. And of course, you know about the Facebook files on the Wall Street Journal. I mean, it's all right there. And what is happening in terms of actually setting this trade? Nothing. People are buying Facebook stock. Now they're going to buy even more because it's down so they can monetize. That's the same people that buy Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, at the exact same time that we're wondering if we can exist in 40 years with 5 degree global warming. This is just dead wrong. So we're going into the future where this again, profit and growth is the paramount objective. Doesn't matter what the externalities are. And this Is the Facebook problem to really end this, to fix this, we have to think more than profit and growth. As I like to keep saying, the good future is all about people, planet, purpose and prosperity. It's not just about one thing. Look at the Facebook stock here. I mean, if you invested in Facebook, 439% increase. That strikes me a lot like the oil companies in the old days. Enormous profits, enormous problems, and enormous other things that we have to work on and nobody does. And here is Mark showing us his beautiful metaverse. And when you watch these videos, you kind of get the feeling like he believes that this is the next big thing, because clearly you don't have to be real to go there. You can be virtual. And I think this is the biggest problem that we're seeing here is that clearly technology can be good or can be bad, but it doesn't have ethics. I'm not talking about Mark here having ethics or not. I sure hope he does. And I try to find them. But, you know, technology doesn't have ethics. And this creates a big problem because if we define ethics like this, it's known the difference between what you have the right or the power to do and what is the right thing to do. You know, Denmark isn't doing the right thing, and Facebook board members aren't doing the right thing because they're doing what they have the power to do. What. What we give them the power to do, which is to mess with our data and pass it on and sell it. We're going to need this. We're going to need protection. We're going to shield ourselves from the things that we never really signed up for. This is abuse. And I think Facebook has that story written all over it. And other social media companies I'll talk about shortly have a very similar story. This needs to end. As a great article in the Atlantic said the other day, basically, it's the largest autocracy on earth that we're currently facing. And how are you going to change that when companies are so powerful and basically can do whatever they want? Great comment here from Gizmodo. It's a testament to Facebook's monopoly that the platform can feel so, so shitty while using deeply inescapable, feeling deeply inescapable at the same time. And that's what everybody says. I talk to says, I can't leave Facebook. I'm selling bicycles or I'm renting my hotel or my house or whatever I do on Facebook. I meet girlfriends or whatever. I can't get away from it. I Mean, this is true feudalism. We can't do anything. And this is what brands do. Brands are lying like a turtle in their bag and saying, oh, my God, no, no, no, we can't do without Facebook. We're going to stuff them with billions of dollars. There was a boycott there for a short time, didn't work, and nobody cared for it, and basically was all just sort of greenwashing or face washing. You could say that is not good. I think brands need to live up to the expectation of doing the right thing with their money. And now Zuck is saying, well, now we've kind of timed out. You know, the user growth isn't there anymore. For the first time ever, Facebook lost users. And now we're going to conquer the Metaverse. We're going to go to this place. This is the Facebook work room, the horizon room, basically, where we go there to work, to live inside of Facebook. If we're tracked and watched and observed already through Facebook, imagine what this will do. I mean, in theory, if it could even work. That is a whole other debate. This seems like a fantastic place for people who are obsessed with geek technology like myself, but in the long run, this is really what the metaverse is. All of these things, concerts, social events, online shopping, workplace social media, device independence, and all these things are coming together in the Facebook universe to create a really, really powerful concoction of new things here. I'm wondering, is it going to be like social media but 500 times as bad? 500 times. The tracking, the obsessions, the surveillance, the manipulation, the dehumanization. Do we really need that? And is it going to be just for the rich like us, you know, the top 10%, which most of us are, you know, we can afford the thousand dollar headset, which is more like couple thousand dollars. The Hololens, of course, and oculus drift. About 400, I think. But it's, you know, basically, you're going to have to have a T1 Internet connection to make this work. Doesn't strike me as a good way forward. So here, this concept here, the useless real life, that's the Metaverse concept. We don't have to live for real. We can live in there. And that would be great because there's so much money to be made. In fact, I'm thinking about starting a Gerdoverse. I talked about that already last week, where we can meet virtually, and I can continue to do that in 50 places in parallel at the same time and charge you lots of money for it. The bottom line is this is dehumanization. And the metaverse could be great for work, for learning, for commerce, but it could also be detrimental to people, to humans, because of the dehumanizing effect. And that is the biggest thing that I believe we've already seen in scenes like Black Mirror. You've seen, of course, all the stuff on Black Mirror, where we basically are living in a world that's constantly supervised and connected, and we're constantly living in the fear of missing out and not connecting and not doing the right thing. Social media is no longer about empowerment. It's about performing. And I have no shame admitting that I am forced to perform on social media. But within reason, all within reason, that's why, again, why I stopped Facebook, because it's not all about performing. There is such a thing as what you really are. And talk about what happened on social media. Of course, in China, the scoring, this is already happening. I'm being scored by how many people follow me on Twitter. I mean, I can buy 50,000 Twitter followers tomorrow if I want higher scoring there. What kind of numbers are those? I mean, this is basically just blowing sugar, you know, where somewhere. So really, what is happening here is that our problem isn't all the tech really. It's how we adapt to it. The biggest problem, the challenge, is not that machines will take over. Not yet, but that we become too much like them, that we think everything is an algorithm and everything needs to be photographed and everything needs to be shared. While this is just a tool. Right, we're using it as a religion. And so the metaverse is everywhere now. You've seen the news, you've seen all that stuff where people talk about what is happening, buying virtual land and cryptocurrency and democratization and Web3 and all that stuff that's promising us exactly the same thing. Then, I don't know, 30 years ago, beginning of the Internet. Will the metaverse be good for us? And who's in charge? If Mark is in charge, I don't want any part of it. And why do we need it? I mean, do we actually need this, or is it just another idea? So let me move on to the future of social media. First, I think, again, what I was saying earlier, in social media, this is the main problem, is that we've become a victim of dehumanization, and we need to rehumanize it. Put the humans back in, Take the AI out. Not out, but put the humans in charge. Keep the humans in the loop. There's nothing wrong with using intelligent machines or AI. If we can also use humans to make up for what really matters. Human editorial, human writing, not bots. Writing bots can probably do some content checks, but that reimanization needs to look like this. The handshake between humans and machines. Imagine if we're going to go into the metaverse and that doesn't happen, we're going to be in the deepest trouble we can imagine. Tim Cook, one of the more wise leaders of technology and a company that I would trust more than most of the other ones. He says technology can do great things, but it doesn't want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. And that is so true. We want to have a good future, we have to do it. We're not going to find a machine that makes us happy or an app that can download happiness, or an app that fixes politics. Again, this is subject to policy. And some policy will include, of course, protection. Like we've been discussing here in Europe and the European government, many of those discussions are very, very strongly about, squarely about this topic. Trust and truth. How are we going to protect what is true? Well, you know, then many people say, well, you know, what is true is always relative. No, it's not. You know, there are still facts that are obviously true or not. I think public service media and public broadcasting principles should be applied to social media broadcasters. Social media, where exchange messages, that's different. That's like a telephone. That should be subject to common carrier rules. But if we're going to use social media for broadcasting, then that is news, that is media needs to be subject to those rules. And here are the rules that we know all too well from public broadcasting. And even more ironic now that the UK now wants to get rid of the BBC, the most vulnerable public broadcasting institution in the world. What a shame. Anyway, universal access, interdependence, impartiality, transparency, a long list. That's what we have to ask from social media. Because when they cross the border from private communications and messages, like maybe Snapchat or so and become Instagram, then we're talking about broadcasting or narrowcasting, whatever you want to call it, should be subject to different rules. And here's the bottom of that. It should be up to the spirit of a common good. Creating a common good, that is the point of media. A common good is not just created by monetization, by more ads and making more money. And this kind of black box problem, like, we don't know how this works, that is just not going to work out for us. We need to empower the users to select their own filters and the sorters and not be subject to some unknown algorithm that sells my information across all websites. So rehumanization, transparency, control of the feed. The algorithms, not just the feed. So why do I see what I see? And can I change what I see and how I see it? And can I opt out completely from how the feed does things? Do I have power? And the answer is, right now, we don't. It's basically Zook in his bedroom deciding if he wants to change that tomorrow. Not good idea. We're living in a world like this, subject to numbers. And you know as well as I do, you know, numbers can be bullshit. I mean, basically, if you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything. I think you heard that before in some of my speeches. But really what we have here is humans don't live by numbers. We're not binary. We're binary. We need nuances, you know, not just zeros and ones, not numbers. And we need meaning, not speed. The most important thing, as Zelligman, a famous psychotherapist, says, happiness is purma, right? Positivity, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment. That's what happens between people. It doesn't happen in numbers. And we should stop trying to find it there. We should move on to a place where we can support this. And we need to go from this idea of data mining, Basically, that is what the Internet has become, and social media has become the primary example of this, to the idea of data mining, where we own the data. Another impressive chart we just finished. Thank Sylvain for creating this social media. We need to create a digital dividend. The benefit of social media has to be passed on. And I think a dividend would be a fair tax to content creators, to journalists, to writers, to public media. To create a public dividend from that. I think that would be completely the right approach to actually make sure some of the money reaches more people than, get this, only six major cities in the US that make most of the money from technology and social media. And of course, the Bay Area is number one. Everybody else gets to worry about their jobs and. And to figure out how they're going to advertise on Facebook to sell their stuff. The European Commission, Mrs. Westager here, has talked about this many times, and I think this is really important to realize what the message of the Commission is. And I think many times it can be perceived as being overly stringent and maybe bureaucratic. But I think they're doing a fantastic job on bringing this home. And so let's listen to this message. We share the same ambition to create a sound and future proof legal framework for trustworthy artificial intelligence in Europe so that people can benefit from AI driven products and services that are safe and that respect European fundamental rights and values. But in the end, is this right, as her colleague says? OSA von der Leyen, the President of course we cannot leave decisions which have a huge impact on democracies to computer programs without human supervision and being run by backrooms or boardrooms in Silicon Valley. We have to understand what this means. This is a major thing in our lives that we need to regulate. And look at all the discussion about the boycotting of Facebook. I encourage you European Commission to keep on pointing the way here and I'm grateful for the Digital Markets act and others that they have already looked at and enacted and set forth and very powerful stuff. I understand sometimes it may take a little step too far, but the bottom line really is all about this. When we move into social media, we think about our future. It's really a great saying here from the Cherokee Indians that I like to use a lot. The wolf you feed is the wolf that wins. We're going to feed the monster of algorithmic media. Give it our money, give it our attention, then this is what we're going to get. It's just like we've been saying, well, we want to drive a car, so we're going to get, we're going to get gas, right? And the oil companies are fine because they help us drive. Well, that is no longer working. And so here's a couple of bullets that I would suggest. First, we need to protect private social media communications just like we do on the telephone, which is obvious. And the next one is more obvious. Require fair accountability, just like social media broadcasters, so that we know exactly what's going on and that we can look inside, regulate and supervise those broadcasters, just like any other media, but hopefully better actually, since we haven't been all that successful here. The next one is empower users to actually switch. These people are not interested in you switching. The metaverse isn't going to allow you to switch quickly back and forth. I mean that is all in theory, real choice on how one's content is being filtered and of course reinforce antitrust. I mean we clearly have monopoly situations here and they don't ensure competition and they end up putting startup in kill zones and to rehumanize, put in the human in the loop. I talked about that earlier already and let's consider something like a mandatory ratio of revenue on Humans. So you make that much money, 112 billion per year. You got to hire a certain amount of actual humans to do actual human things, not just programmers. Right? And let's consider another one, the digital dividend I mentioned earlier. I know this is going to be strikingly unpopular and if I was a politician I would be hung. But hey, you know, I can afford to say this because I'm not a politician. It's going to be a constant back and forth between AI, artificial intelligence and hi, human intelligence and require wisdom. Let's get some leaders with real wisdom that can figure this out. It's not that we just need either or. Like I said earlier, it's not yes or no. Social media has great benefits for all of us, but we do have to get to a point of balance and maybe this is a good time to consider paid for social media platforms. I'd love to pay 30, 40, 50 bucks a year to do what I would like to do on Facebook, but won't. And why hasn't that worked? Well, many people have tried, you know, Lo and others. No investors, no IPOs owned by the users, no advertising, no tracking. Blockchain background. Why not? If you have any ideas, let me know. I'm going to wrap this up now and talk about where this is going and what we can do to drive this home. Point number one, we have to end this idea of making good money doing bad things, not so good things. That pretty much describes Facebook just like it describes Aramco. And that has to end because it's destructive, it's corrosive, it's toxic, and in a way you could say it's kind of ending right. Look at the stock market decline of Facebook. Of course that has little to do with the fact that they're doing these things. It's just basically because their user growth has stalled and the stock market is not doing the right thing in my view is to split a company like this. And I would encourage you to pull all your money out if you own stock. I've been saying this for a long time. Pull your usership and everything. Bottom line of all of that is in the end, what kind of future do you want for yourself, for your children, for your grandchildren, depending how old you are, It's a choice. If social media is shooting at democracy and shooting at friendship and shooting at humanity, these are the choices. Disinformation or democracy, Polarization or collective good, Monetization or conversation, Loneliness or togetherness. Algorithms, AI or andro rhythms as I call them. Human things. Those are the choices that we have. Let's make the right choice, as Douglas Rushkoff likes to say with his amazing book Team Human or Team Robot. That's the choice you have privately and as a government and as a country. And those are the choices that we need to make. So now I talked a long time. I know I get excited talking about these things and I'm going to wind it down a little bit more next time. But now we're going to do questions and Marcia has some questions for me, I'm sure of that. Great. I wish I could read them now because my prompter is sitting right in front of it. I'll do my best. Big dominating sectors who can redistribute. Sorry. Getting up of their profit to fund ubi. Sorry. I'm going to find another way of seeing this. Just a minute here. Okay, this is one problem I didn't anticipate. I have to actually be able to read this. So I'm going to take a look. Do you see a sensible step as closing the equality? Yes, I do. I think it's all about distribution, basically the distribution of revenues and how we pay for what. And it's not just taxes. I mean, it makes sense to make sure that money is being evenly distributed. And right now it's not. The benefits of technology are going to us when we use WhatsApp for free calls and Spotify and so on, but the financial benefits are going to very, very few little percentage of the people that own the technology. And that isn't right. And first we're going to fix the global corporate tax that's already in progress. And I think ultimately sort of a digital dividend would be totally appropriate to fix all the things that have been broken. So thanks, Robert, for the question. Let's pull another one here and see if we can do better with the reading. Okay. James Barrett. As AI's power moves towards general AI, this is really going to. I'm going to move this over here. Just give me one second here to actually be able to read this. Sorry about that. Practical things. Just a minute. So you see, we are not entirely perfect on this quite yet. And you're kind of like the guinea pigs. I'm just kidding. So as AI's power moves towards general AI and beyond, is the lineup of tech giants in charge of the technology ethical enough to discharge responsibility? Again, I would say not. And the other problem is clearly that maybe it isn't the job of a tech company CEO to worry about the future of the world. It's not the job of the World bank to save the world, as was outlined in the Ministry for the Future. Maybe it will become the job of the World bank to do that. But does the CEO have other goals than solving these problems? Of course. And in the end, I think we can't really get the companies who own the power of technology to restrain themselves and not take in a trillion dollars. That's like asking Aramco to say, would you like to make sure that oil becomes superfluous and the price goes down? We're going to need a lot of government intervention here, a lot of wisdom, and a lot of users refusing to be part of it and voting with their money. And it will take all these actions to actually get to a point where technology companies are going to change their behavior. I mean, you can see with Apple, for example, you can say what you want about Apple, but this is an important strategy. Privacy is at the core of what Apple is doing and wants to do, and they may sometimes go wrong there as well. But clearly the idea of the luxury payments that we pay for Apple versus being more private is of course also an exclusivity issue. So I think, basically going back to what I said a long time ago in my book, Technology vs. Humanity, which is right here. There it is. Beautiful, right? My animation. Love my animation. I said in the book, basically, we need to make sure that we go into a future where we can balance those two things and where we can figure out what is the right thing to do, where we can build something like an ethics council. And I think, you know, it's been tried that. Facebook, of course, failed completely. All you have to do about that, read Dave Egger's new book called the. Well, the first one was called the Circle and the other one is called the Ivory. It's just, it just came out. Great book to read, comedy on the current situation in Silicon Valley. But basically we're going to need some sort of global ethics council. And I've recently started calling it the Humanity Futures Council, because if we don't solve this problem, we're compiling large problems on top of each other, creating huge structural issues. Thanks for the question. James, you're the guy that wrote the book. Great to have you here. Tim Cole, great member of the Futures Agency. Thanks, Tim. And greetings to Austria. How can we realistically hope to ever rein the Internet monopolies in antitrust? In 1890, said Roosevelt, do we have time to fix the web? Yeah, it's not just about antitrust. I think the main thing is about the market realizing that when all you care about is growth and profit and more jobs and more monetization, you end up with a broken world. And so advertisers need to pull their money from social media when it isn't done right. And that is another big debate. And when you stop supporting monopolies, of course, initially there is a suffering moment because you don't have the reach anymore. And I understand, you know, many people in India or in Asia, they sell everything on Facebook and they rent their houses on Facebook. And so this will take a lot of juggling. I think the European Commission, again, is doing a very good job in reining those monopolies, trying to rein them in. But it's also up to the users to stop using it. Just like we will stop buying cars with gas engines because we feel guilty. And we're going to fly less until we see airlines that have sustainable airplane fuel or take the train. Right. We're going to take our own actions. I do think in the next 10 years, this is going to be solved. And this issue of digital ethics, of course, then just goes from social media to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, it's the same issue. So a combination of antitrust, a combination of user behavior, a combination of capital punishment in the sense of removing capital from the pipeline, I think that would go a long way to address this problem. And I certainly would welcome a conversation with Johnny Clegg. Johnny, I think that's his name. Right. And of course, with Zook on these topics. I would have a few ideas on that. But anyway, I think it's much harder done than said, because clearly that amounts to a total revamp of the cash cow. And are people going to revamp the cash cow? Kind of doubt it. So thanks, Tim, for the question. Let's have another question here. Human Worldcity is concerned about how CO2, this robot will go to consume. Well, very good question. 20% of CO2 today is being put out by computing by data and computers, and that can be done much better. And companies like Google and Microsoft and others are making big steps to build more sustainable data centers. All that is happening, but, you know, the Metaverse is going to suck up data and computing power. And this is why the Intel CEO believes that it can't even be done. He says we don't even have 1000th of the computing power we need to run the Metaverse. We're Talking about live 3D rendering in games like the Sims or other sort of games that people play there. 50, 100 or 200 people are a lot at the Same time rendering. Imagine if we have 200 million people rendering. That is a huge concern needs to be addressed. In my view, also, technology companies have to do a lot more to be sustainable and also making very, very big steps to make computing more efficient and less energy intense. And this is an ongoing debate. I think otherwise we may very well end up at the point where 50% of electricity use is going to go towards data centers, and that would be a very bad thing occurring. Keep asking questions and I hope you enjoy the show on, on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitch and vcontuctor Robert Schramm, thanks for asking. Do you think we can firstly use the Metaverse to create concepts, to create a better world? No, we're going to create a better world. Not with technology. The good future isn't subject to technology. Technology is a very big part of our good future because it makes it possible. It makes it possible to reinvent and to redo and to. And to redesign, to go green. As I keep saying, big blue technology, not IBM. Big blue and big green and big human. That's the ticket. So clearly technology is the ticket to that future. But we can't hope that the Metaverse will change human issues like how do we agree on stuff, what is public governance? What kind of taxes are we going to pay? How are we going to connect to other people? What are the rules? Technology doesn't solve social, cultural, political problems. That's a policy question. And I think it's fatal to think of this. You know, this issue is going to be addressed by business. No, business will do a very, very big part of this. It's a public, private thing. In the end, that is going to be the ticket for the future. And it has to be run by common sense. It has to be run by people who understand the future beyond technology. And we shouldn't just be doing everything we can just because we can. The Metaverse is one of those things. If we can actually do this, it could be detrimental for humans, human beings. Kind of like the mobile phone is detrimental in many ways, but a thousand X and I can see myself already getting stuck. I use a mobile phone a lot, but I'm going to have it here and then I'm going to get so used to being connected, I'm going to buy Elon Musk's brain computer interface so I can be superhuman. Very bad idea, very addictive, not a solution. So I think really we do need to think about different levels of how we can solve this problem, not just one. Thanks for the question, Robert. And we have more questions coming in. You guys are busy. Thanks, Vladimir Kuparinen. So the Digital Services act promises individual control over his or her data? Yes, I think it's entirely possible to make it enforceable. First of all, I really do believe that digital sovereignty, meaning that our data is where we are. I'm not talking about Switzerland, I'm talking about Europe. But I'm also a German citizen. Right. I mean, that is where it would all start, having our data here under our jurisdiction. And of course, we have to have technical wherewithal for that. And it's really a shame that Switzerland hasn't made a move on this yet, because it would be the perfect place to keep all data safe. All the beautiful mountains with the caves. So I think it's entirely possible to do that. It's just going to be more complicated. And I think. I don't buy the argument of saying, well, if we make it more safe and we have more provisions, then it becomes more difficult, it's going to cost more money. There's plenty of money here. I mean, you saw it earlier, it's just where we put it. Why would we not want to do that? Why would we not want to keep it human? Just because we have concerns about profit levels. And again, if we switch away from the nasdaq's thinking to what I call the Susdaq, the sustainable nasdaq, which I hope Switzerland will eventually start, People, Planet, Purpose, Prosperity, then this is an obvious move. It's just part of the package. And again, I think Europe is kind of moving into this social capitalism future, this sustainable capitalism that is underlying all of those changes. And I think we have 10 years and then we're going to see that emerging. So I'm quite optimistic on this. Thanks, Vladimir. Good question. So, we have more questions coming in. Oh, Tim Cole again, you just can't get off the comment button. Thanks very much. So what's the difference between Zuckerberg's Metaverse and the old MySpace and has become an avatar graveyard? Well, I think the difference really is that technologically speaking, we're just in a completely different place. You know, VR is actually pretty cool. I've tried it many times and yes, it's expensive, requires getting used to, requires a T1 Internet, at least 1 gigabyte if you can. And so does the hologram. But, you know, this is a few years away. When we get 5G, can you do the Metaverse? Well, you can, yes. Not all the same time. The differences were like on the exponential curve, you know, in the MySpace times we were below 1, so doubling 0.1 to 0.2 to 0.4 didn't amount to much. But on the exponential curve, we're now at 4, 8, 16. We're leaping. And so the same question can be asked about singularity or, you know, transhumanism. It's becoming possible. It's not, maybe not the next few years immediately, but I do think that in the end, technically speaking, it will become possibly quicker than we think. And then we're going to be left with the question of whether we want it and what are the rules. And again, if the rules are one party rules and a couple companies are getting together to work out the metaverse that we're going to move in because the real world sucks. Like many people keep telling me, the world is so bad and I live in a very cramped space, I may as well live in the metaverse. That is not a good way to look at the future. Not what I call the good future. Thanks, Tim, for the question. We're going to take one more question because, you know, then we're just going to go on. Okay, so it's a solution to cut Facebook in different parts. You know, I don't know. I don't really have an opinion on that. I think antitrust and organizing the reduction of power for Facebook would be good, but this goes beyond Facebook. I don't want to single out Facebook as being the evil evil and everybody else is not. That's clearly not the case. I think what we built here is algorithmic media. And that is true for LinkedIn. That is true for Twitter to some degree. That's true. Definitely true for YouTube and of course for Google. And so I would be much more into a digital dividend to enable companies to invent and creators to create from a public fund. Also to support public media to create an anti dao too. And of course the provision to say that you need to hire more humans. Why is Metaverse again, meta. Sorry, why is Meta hiring 10,000 programmers in Europe? Well, it makes them look good to the European governments around them. And that is a good thing, of course, for people. But let's hire 2,000 humans. Not just engineers, which are also humans, of course, but also on the wider sense. How about writers, artists, creators paying a tribute? I mean, this is clearly going to the point where to really change the monopoly position, we have to soften the impact of what these big companies can do. And of course, search and Google is another major issue that I'll talk about some other time. I'll take one More question and then I think it's time, time to tune out. I do want to show you, before we take that question, is going back to what we had discussed earlier about the girderwerse. So I'm preparing the girderwurst and this is my future gerdeverse. And I think it looks actually much better because this way I can appear if slightly fat for some reason. That's the angle of the I thumb. But I can appear, of course, much more amenable to trendy concept. And of course I can change my avatar at the drop of a bucket. So I don't know what you think about that, but it is a good adversary. Anyway. Next question. So one more question and then we're going to move out. Cedric Bianc, how do you see the impact of the governments using social media in misinforming the population? Will they not most likely do anything to maintain the power? Yes, but you know, that problem isn't new. Of course, government has always used media to misinform and to redirect. Of course, the difference was that we knew about it. So if you read Pravda, then you know what's in it, just like when you read Rupert Murdoch's publication, you know what's going to be in it or when you watch Fox News. So the misinformation really is an algorithmic side effect. I think if we had more human editors and more human supervision, there would be a lot less of this. And I'm not talking about human supervision in the sense of eradicating uploads or fixing comments, but actually in the creation of this, in the filtering and to see what's real and what's not real. And I think that the misinformation could be largely stemmed with this. But then again, of course, social media companies want to hire less humans and build more machines. That is the entire business model, as Douglas Rushkoff again likes to say. Silicon Valley says that we are essentially saying in Silicon Valley that humans are the problem and technology is the solution. And that is clearly the wrong approach. So I want to thank you very much for tuning in. I'm really excited that we're doing this and we're going to fix our technical issues more in the future. Please do subscribe to my YouTube channel. I think that's going to be crucial. And now we're going to have a special gift for you, all of your 21,000 who are hanging out on the channel. My book, Technology vs. Humanity is five years old. It's still doing great using this code up here. Up here? No, up there. You can scan the code. You're very used to that from the COVID scanning, I'm sure. And you can get yourself a free copy of my book as an ebook and get it instantly in there. If you don't already have it. Of course, if you don't already have it, then you're in trouble anyway because you missed out on a very important publication. So in the end, we're going to play a short little snippet of my film, the Good Future, and you can download it and watch it on the goodfuturefilm.com and that is going to be extremely important to understand where we are going with this because I think social media can be a part of that Good future if we start fixing it and making it more human again. Thanks very much for tuning in and let's roll the film. Thanks to the team for helping me. Bye and live long and prosper. Every two weeks I'll have a new show for you, audio and video on what the future holds, what's important today, and how we're going to design what I call the good future. Visit gerdtalks.com for more details, schedules and updates and I hope to see you on the show.