A brief monologue by Brian Johnson criticizing contemporary society and arguing that technological design choices—particularly in social technologies—could have prioritized human flourishing instead of attention-hacking. He frames current harms as the downstream, unintended consequences of earlier choices and calls for making implicit assumptions explicit to enable creative solutions and clear boundaries.
We live in a very sick society in which things that are normal in the sense that everyone's doing them, are treated as if they were natural or inevitable, and they're not. We could live in a very different society right now. I mean, insanely different. Technology that was created to connect people via social could have started as technology for flourishing. Could have started as a well, we would never hack anyone's attention. We would never do that. Why would we do that? That might lead to this. We're going to do this. Those choices could have been made. Now we're downstream, however many trillions of impressions later, and we need deal with the downstream consequences that were unintended yet catastrophic. And just seeing that and I know I'm stating the obvious, but making the obvious implicit explicit gives us really big creative challenges to figure out what bright lines are created.
