Exploring The Informational Ecosystem with Jimmy Wales

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of Another way. It's a different sort of episode talking to a different sort of person.

A friend I've known for more than 20 years. When he first approached me before the

birth or the real birth of Wikipedia

and asked how could it be done? I didn't have any ideas for him. All the ideas were his and his co founders. But Jimmy Wales has been an inspiration for many, many years, and his decisions

in the architecture of the business model

of Wikipedia, I think, are among the most important social organization decisions of our time.

And so in this episode, we're going

to explore a little bit about what went into the design of Wikipedia that made it possible for it to operate as a platform understood to be neutral, as neutral as any platform could be, and covering so stories and the news and information, and begin to think about how those same values might be extended beyond the context of an online encyclopedia. Jimmy, of course, has been deeply invested in thinking through other models of information and cultural exchange ever since and has had a number of very successful businesses that have grown, as well as experiments that have not succeeded. And so in this conversation, I think you'll see the contours of the solution. And by the end, I at least was optimistic that we had a sense of what the right kind of solution would be. So stay tuned.

So thanks for doing this, Jimmy. It's great to see you again. Here's the puzzle. We're in a context where, at least in the American media environment, Americans are led to radically different views of the same facts. We just had an election. 70% of Republicans believe that election was not free and fair. 75% of Trump voters believe that Trump won the election. Those beliefs have no connection to reality, and yet people act on them, even violently, as January 6th demonstrates. As I've been struggling to understand how we should think about dealing with this problem, I was drawn back to thinking about an innovation which you launched more than 20 years ago for producing information that wasn't captured by this polarizing norm. I just wanted us to come back and remember a little bit about what motivated these ideas to launch Wikipedia. What did you learn about how you could bring radically different people to talk about a subject in a way that tried to, as much as possible, neutralize these inherent polarizing tendencies? So let's just start with that, because I know you've thought a lot about this. I know you have started to think about your own.

I mean, you're building your own social

network to try to address some of this, but I just would love to bring back the founder of Wikipedia to talk about how we as a community, as a public, can think about critical issues in a way that doesn't destroy us.

Well, it's, it's a huge topic and as, as you said, it's one I've given a great deal of thought to over the years. And fortunately, in terms of making for a very interesting discussion, it's a multifaceted and very complex problem. Unfortunately, it also means I don't have any magic silver bullet solutions to it. And also I have in many ways I feel a lack of understanding really of exactly what's going on right now in the sense that, you know, when I see numbers like the ones you just quoted, and I try to reconcile that with understanding where people get information and what kind of information they're getting and so on and so forth, there's no simple answer to it. In other words, people, I mean, I believe that you have various news sources that would be more popular on the right and various news sources would be more popular on the left, and there's a lot to criticize about some of those more right leaning sources. So Fox News, Newsmax and so on. But I also think if you. And I admit I haven't actually recently, I live in the UK now, so I haven't actually watched Fox News recently, but I suspect they aren't on there campaigning every day now that Trump won the election. They may have guests on who are more inclined to say such a thing, or they may report things in such a way that leaves the viewer a little more open to doubt than they should be, and so on and so forth. But it isn't as if there's a very simple answer of saying, well, Fox News is just lying to people and that's that. And even if that were the simple answer, that still leaves us with a very hard problem of what do we do about it? Or what does that mean exactly. But so I mean, I guess to go back to the question of Wikipedia and how do we think about these issues and how do I think about them? I think it's really, again, it's a complicated and multifaceted thing, but I think part of it is that the Wikipedia community has taken from the very beginning the stance that neutrality is non negotiable. I said that from day one of Wikipedia. I said neutral point of view is non negotiable. And what I meant by that, at the time, I didn't really, I wasn't thinking about the problem of polarization in the media and in the public 20 years later. What I just meant was we shouldn't become like, it's easy to imagine partly because it exists or has existed, the Catholic Encyclopedia. So encyclopedia written by and endorsed by the Catholic Church, which, by the way, as far as I'm aware, having looked at it sort of casually over the years, pretty high quality in many metrics, but would have perspectives that might not agree with sort of the mainstream view on certain particular issues. I mean, it's easy to imagine that the Catholic Encyclopedia is going to take a certain view of certain scientific facts and so on that are perhaps outside the mainstream of science, but done in a quality way. You know, they'll have proper, serious theologians who've written quality work and so on and so forth. But it's not intended to be, in their case, neutral. It's intended to put forward a serious, thoughtful Catholic view of the world. And I just thought, well, we shouldn't do that. And there were two reasons why I don't believe that's what an encyclopedia should be. I accept that it could be and that it's not a terrible thing if there's a sort of progressive encyclopedia or a Catholic encyclopedia or what have you. But I wanted a neutral encyclopedia. I wanted an encyclopedia that doesn't tell me what to think, but gives me all of the sides that are sort of worth considering in a reasonable way, so that I can then come to a debate and make up my own mind, I can gather the information I need. So that was one reason. The other reason is that in order to have an open collaborative project where you get people together from different sides, it becomes very, very difficult if you're not sort of committed to some ideal other than truth with a capital T, which we may never agree upon. But the idea that, okay, we should chew on ideas and present them fairly and be neutral about which of several controversial points might actually be, at the end of the day, the correct one. Then it becomes possible for people of goodwill to work together. So there was a fun sort of thing. Fun for me, it wasn't fun for the people involved. The Los Angeles Times did a very short lived experiment where they were using MediaWiki software, which is the software that runs Wikipedia. They were going to do sort of a wiki editorial model. So they opened up the wiki using our software and they said something, you know, it was a very basic kind of introductory topic like war in Iraq, good or bad. And what happened very, very quickly was you come to the idea that, okay, this is an opinion editorial. There's, it's really hard for people of good faith to work together on one document there. You can, if you, if you've got a certain kind of sort of editorial fortitude. If you wrote an editorial that I disagreed with or I wrote an editorial that you disagree with, we could say, okay, I'm going to edit this, but I'm not going to try to change your perspective. I'm just going to help with sentence structures, you know, some writerly things. But in terms of actually coming to a consensus editorial that we both agree with on a topic that we disagree with, it's not possible. So, you know, it's that sort of neutrality, though we could say if we're people of goodwill. And the example I like to use here is imagine a very kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a very kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist and they're going to write about the topic of abortion and they're never going to agree at the end of the day on, but the priest is going to understand very quickly that, okay, the entry isn't going to say abortion is a sin. It's going to say the Catholic Church position on abortion is thus and such. And the Planned Parenthood activists can say, and critics have responded this, and you know, suddenly we got, okay, now we've got a document that we can work on together. And that neutrality is the only way that I know of outside of a few other fun examples. I was surprised when people can write humorous things together. But even there, it's sort of helpful to have a set of inside jokes and parameters that you go with. It's sort of like for two people to collaborate on a poem. Very difficult for two people to collaborate on a fan fiction Star Trek episode. Kind of a lot more straightforward because that's a formula. Like we all know how Spock behaves and how Kirk behaves and the sorts of situations they get into. So with the encyclopedia, that that collaborative element meant that neutrality worked really, really well. And there's a lot of, not just sort of ideology in the community around that. Although there is right. There is a lot of conversation, a lot of talk, a lot of desire that we should try to be neutral, but also that just the dynamics of the site help drive towards that. If you write something that's very one sided, it just won't survive for very long. You know, someone will come in and make it more neutral or a big argument will break out and that sort of thing. So I think that's, that's a part of it now. When we step back from that and we, and we look more broadly to try to think as well about what are the, I don't know, socioeconomic factors or cultural factors. If you look at even television news, which isn't plagued by exactly the same kind of clickbait problems that online news has been because it's still got a more traditional business model with advertisers and so on and so forth, still there appears to be quite a good market in having a, you know, progressive or a Catholic encyclopedia. Except for news. You know, there is a market for Fox News to be more right leaning. There is a market and that shouldn't be a terrible, terrible thing. You know, I don't think all news needs to be completely perfectly neutral. I think, you know, it ideally, you know, and this is a concept, by the way, that's very American. I don't see it nearly as much in the UK papers. Ideally, you've got your front page, your news page, which is objective and neutral, and then you've got your opinion columnists and different papers may have a certain stance in that. Here the opinion is more infused in everything. And so if you see a story on the front page of the Daily Mail, it's very likely to be transparently and obviously sort of agenda driven in a way that in the US maybe it is sometimes, but in general there's this sort of view that it probably shouldn't be too much so. But with, with television news, you know, it's we, we have that, but I'm not sure really is that really the source of the problem? That's where I get kind of puzzled. I don't know, I'm going on and on and on.

Yeah, let's step back. I'm very interested in, first of all, at the birth of Wikipedia. I mean, from my own perspective, you made two really critical decisions that, but for these decisions, there wouldn't have been a Wikipedia. One of them was this perspective on neutrality. The second one was the commitment not to take ads and those feed each other. Because I think what you see in the context of cable news, for example, when Roger Ailes came along in Fox News and said to them, look, our future is to speak to our base. We should stop trying to speak to everybody and we should learn to just speak to the conservative base. That was a brilliant commercial insight about why non neutrality would actually pay more. And it could have been with Wikipedia, if you had chosen to have ads that there would have been some bean counter who said, you know, actually articles like this get us more ads. Than articles like that. And so therefore we should be tilting our editorial judgment in this way versus that way. I mean, but you foreclosed that opportunity commercially and ideologically by committing to neutrality. Now, you know, was this just an insight or, or like, did you trip into it or what gave you this possible insight at the birth of Wikipedia?

I mean, to me it just seemed obvious that this is what you would want. And I do think there was a. There's people can be a bit overstating, kind of like the early dreams and ideals of the Internet versus the later commercialization of the Internet. I think that's too simplistic. But this definitely did come from that sort of earlier ideals kind of place of like, it's like free software, open source software. It's people getting together and doing some cool things because it's fun and interesting rather than really thinking about what's the best business model. And that was just in some ways part of that early culture. You know, it was like rough consensus and running code. You know, it's that kind of thing. And a lot of it really was around rough consensus and running code. It's like we made these decisions historically, that is in a context and in reaction to events and so on, as well as in a principled way. And I think we were very fortunate at various points in time, you know, one of the things I always say about the, you know, the real sort of how the community functions and the institutions of the community, including how admins are elected, including how the arbitration committee works, which the arbitration committee is like the Supreme Court of each language of Wikipedia. A lot of those things exist and it's a completely radically different model from what I would call a master and surf model, which we have virtually everywhere else on the Internet. And part of the reason for that is not that I had this amazing insight that there would be a way for the community to manage itself, it's that there was no choice because Wikipedia is really a child of the dot com crash. And I think, you know, if as Wikipedia started to really boom, which was really during the depth of the dotcom crash, if I had had the ability to go out and raise $10 million, which would have been a perfectly normal and natural kind of step, what would have easily happened is, as you can imagine, okay, all right, we've got this website, we've got all these users, they're doing some great stuff, we're building, but we're starting to see a few problems here and there. So we need to hire some moderators, we need to Hire some community managers who will go in and police the content. Which is exactly how it's done at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, everywhere. Which we never did because we had no money to hire anybody. So we were forced to say, well, how do we figure out, how do we do this? In a way which means things like you can, you know, admins are elected by the community, you can lose your admin ship, but we don't have re election. So an admin is sort of an admin for life because they need to have the strength. They don't need to be pandering to a shrieking mob sometimes, but they do need to sort of follow the rules or they lose their adminship and so on and so forth. Like there's a million little decisions in that which we would have never come to. We would have never really had any way of getting to those if we had had the money to just hire people to do content moderation. And as we know that that sort of top down feudal model of content moderation is, it doesn't scale. Like, I mean it scales in one sense you can have a really big site, but socks, it's like it doesn't, it doesn't work that well. And we've seen that, you know, all, all the sorts of things like, you know, why, why was Donald Trump able to get away with behavior that most people couldn't on the platform? And that's very obvious. Like the man kept them in the front headlines of the news on every news website in the world for years and years and years. Twitter became massive because Trump was on there breaking the rules every day. You know, like I can understand it. Like if I were on the board of Twitter I would have been very hard pressed to say, yeah, actually we need to get rid of this guy because he's breaking the rules because frankly he's making the platform as well. So I mean you can understand it. You may not approve of it and I don't approve of it, but I can see how that happens. Whereas at Wikipedia that's not in the hands of the Wikimedia foundation at all. Like the community would just, you know, it's a different type of platform. Of course though it's not a free speech platform, it's an encyclopedia. So there are some other details, but I think that the non commercial aspect of things is, is fairly important here. And the, the ads, although I think the, the ads, when I think about Fox News, I think one piece of the Fox News phenomenon that a lot of people miss and I think, well As I say, I haven't been living in the US for 10 years now, so I'm talking about Fox News when I lived there more than 10 years ago. And what people missed was that they had a lot. They still have a lot of opinion shows with a host who's got a view and is promoting it, and it's an editorialized talk show. And then they've got the little snippets of news in between. Those tended, back then especially, they tended to be quite professionally well done. They were as good as anything on cnn, except for one thing. They were about issues and stories that were of interest to people in Alabama, where I grew up and Tennessee, whereas CNN tended to have stories and issues that were of interest to people who were urban elites. And that's. That is a market segmentation where it is, yes, in a sense, playing to the base, but it's playing the base in a way that's not ideologically offensive. It's just like, you know what? Actually people in Alabama care a lot more about crops. I don't know, crops just made that up. I actually don't know what a good example might be. Whereas, you know, in New York they care a lot more about drug problems in the inner cities, which just isn't a thing, you know. And so that aspect of things is sometimes overlooked that actually Fox was delivering not just an ideologically conformative product for more conservative leaning people, but actually a better product in many ways. And that's an interesting piece of the whole puzzle.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's right to think about what they're delivering as something different from ide, but it's consistent with seeing it as identity. They were delivering a certain kind of identity. And the genius of Roger Ailes was to recognize that in a highly competitive market, having a clear brand identity was going to make you much more successful with advertisers than if you weren't. But I agree with you, it's different when you jump to the Internet. And this is where it's really interesting to think about the counterfactual with Wikipedia. I mean, you know, when, when we were at the seeing the birth of the Internet, nobody was conceiving of an infrastructure that would monitor or surveil, as Shoshana Zuboff so nicely puts it, surveillance capitalism. Surveil everything you do and build these extraordinary AI driven models to figure out who you are based on, you know, the seven clicks you've done. And they weren't imagining building a infrastructure of commerce on top that would trade on all of that data. And even more than just standing back and watching what you do, what Facebook is so famous for is the idea that they actually tweak you or poke you or make you angry or just to produce more information that they can then use to commercialize the opportunity.

And I think a piece of this that's, you know, increasingly clear to me is that the algorithms themselves do that without direct human intervention. I can't really. I don't know as many people at Facebook, but I know people, very, very senior people at, for example, YouTube. And I can tell you, YouTube, the people running it have no interest in radicalizing young men. It's not a thing they want to do. It has no business value to them. But whenever you've got a very powerful set of algorithms that are designed to optimize, let's say, time on site or how many ads you view and possibly drive you towards slightly more remunerative advertising and so on and so forth, then the result in terms of ideas and quality and thoughtfulness are kind of what they are. And if you're not really caring about that or you're not paying enough attention to it, even if you start to pay attention to it, it's a real struggle. And actually, this is one of the areas I always say I'm a pathological optimist, but one of the areas that I'm somewhat pessimistic about is if it is true that algorithmic sort of driving people on free content that's advertising supported, if it's true that that tends to inflammatory content, low quality content, et cetera, et cetera, I don't think even if they're very, very well meaning, which is in some cases probably optimistic to assume, even if you're very, very well meaning, it becomes very, very difficult for the same reasons that it's very, very difficult to say to Twitter, why don't you just kick Trump off? Because even if you say, look, we have no interest in driving people to the most, you know, sort of train crash course content, if it works, you're gonna have a hard time resisting doing that. And for me, this is where I think it's time to start thinking about different business models to compete with that and to say, you know, there's all the classic sayings which we've all known forever, which is, you know, if. If you're not the customer, you're the product and that sort of thing. But it's become really, you know, quite acutely clear that a lot of this stuff is really very problematic in ways that, yeah, as you say, we didn't foresee.

Yeah. I mean, just to give another example, to emphasize the AA point, but then to build on this point about, like, what just naturally follows. I think it's. In the fall of 2017, it was revealed that Facebook had a category in their advertising platform called Jew Hater. Now, there was no Facebook engineer who created the category Jew Hater. It was their AI that figured out that there were a bunch of Jew haters. Jew people who hated Jews, and they were a good market, and they could target to them. And so the machine started selling ads on the basis of Jew haters.

And.

And, you know, Facebook, of course, stopped. You know. No, you know, they were astonished that their technology did this, but it's. It's just what super smart AI will eventually do. So I think this is a really important point. But the second point is, like, you're exactly right about expecting them to do the right thing. I think the great analogy here is actually to fast food. There's this great book. Salt, Sugar, Fat, I think is the title. And the basic story this book tells is, first of all, the story of food science, which, of course, is a science to produce product which is extremely addictive to human bodies. Like, because of the way we've evolved, the perfect mix of salt, sugar, and fat is almost irresistible. So they're trying to develop this to market their product, not because they're trying to make us unhealthy, because they're trying to make a lot of money. But the great part of this book is that Michael Moss wrote the book. The great part of this book is the story of these executives that these companies like Kraft Foods, who see the light. We're poisoning America. We've got to stop doing this. So they begin to produce healthy products. But then, of course, people don't want healthy products, so the market punishes them, and then they're kicked out of Kraft Foods. And it's the same dynamic here. I mean, if you begin to talk about how to have healthy political news, you could imagine somebody at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, standing up and saying, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have safe political news. And then it would turn out they're not as compelling. And so therefore, the stock market would punish them, and, you know, she'd be gone.

Yeah. So, although, to be slightly more optimistic about it, I always remind people that Wikipedia is incredibly popular. At one point, I would say that it's more popular than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. And I haven't Checked that fact in a while, but I'm sure it's probably still true. And so what I think is that, you know, to be very, very simplistic. But I, because I'm not a brain scientist. So, you know, but there's, there's. As a human being, we're all very aware of what we might call our Aristotelian brain and our monkey brain, reptilian brain, you know, and so we, we, we really want, and we actively value high quality, thoughtful information that we can read and learn from and become better human beings. And we really do value that. At the same time, we click on stuff that just, you know, caught our eye and we share things on social media because we are either afraid they're true or we hope they're true. And we do all these kind of other behaviors, very addictive behaviors. I tried TikTok, for example, which of all the things sort of talk about political influence and all of that. TikTok is pretty benign. It's mostly just goofy, silly stuff, but it's incredibly addictive. And what I found is very, very quickly. TikTok figured out what I didn't like and what I did like. So when I go on TikTok, I get a lot of cooking videos. I also get grown up women dancing, not little girls dancing because that kind of creeps me out. They figured that out, right? They're like, okay, they know nothing about me. Zero. They haven't analyzed me demographically. I didn't, you know, I gave them no information. But just for my behavior, they figured out, okay, if, if we show him this, he'll keep watching and if we show him that, he'll stop and, and it's, it's incredibly powerful. So I deleted it from my phone because it's a little bit of a waste of time and scary. So I, I made a conscious sort of Aristotelian brain decision to say, I'm going to delete this. This isn't actually a good way for me to spend my time and I'd rather not. But of course, we're all like that. You can find yourself. I actually find myself this way around political news. I think it's very, very good and important to be politically well informed and sort of in our social circle, that's considered to be a good thing. At the same time, I think we can also admit there's just too much of it. You know, I made a conscious decision, which I mostly stuck to. I would never ever click on a headline that seemed to promise to tell me what Donald Trump tweeted last night because I was like, there's, I'm sure it's terrible, I'm sure it's outrageous. I'm sure there's nothing I can do about it and there's no actionable information here. But that's, you know, so because of that, that duality, I think there is an opportunity around designing new media, designing new spaces that aren't as addictive. Maybe yes, might not be as profitable, true. But could be quite successful at saying, okay, here's a place you can come when you're feeling like you want to be smarter, you want to be more useful. I mean, an example during lockdown, like you, we used to see each other fairly often out traveling the world, giving speeches and I've been at home here in my attic and I thought, you know what? I used to love computer programming and coding and I've got a little extra time. So I went on Udemy and I started doing programming classes again. Had an absolutely fantastic time. Find it very spend hours and hours doing something, get into a flow, learning, growing and I feel good about it at the end of the day and I pay them money for it. And that's a successful business model. And I think that's, that's where we should be exploring is to say, let's step back. You can't, I don't think you can have a sort of a Facebook competitor, Twitter competitor that is different from them. As long as you start with the same business model as them, it's going to drive you to the same place. So I, I, a few years ago I started Wiki Tribune, which in the initial sort of iteration was just saying, okay, let's try to do more collaborative news and didn't want to have so no ads, no pay wall, I joke, a series of bad business decisions. But that's how I've built my career so far. And, but the idea was, okay, let's just try and let's start digging in. Let's figure out what's broken with journalism. Let's try to do neutral, high quality. And what I found over time, there were a great many things that I learned during that experiment. One was it's actually really, really hard for people to collaborate on news simply because it's not an encyclopedia. You actually need first hand reporters doing journalism, otherwise it's quite hard to get anywhere. The second thing I learned is we're looking at the site, we've got a big response, a lot of people signed up, people were eager to support and hired 10 journalists. And we Started putting out content and trying to work with the community to collaborate on the content and so on and so forth. And then I'm reviewing the site traffic and site statistics, and what I see is, oh, like, oh, this story really got a lot of traction. What's up there? And I go on and look at it and I'm like, oh, it's kind of got a slightly aggressively clickbaity headline. Not to my taste, but it worked. And you suddenly started to say, actually, I do know how to make this more popular. I just build buzzfeed again. Right. And by the way, I actually have a lot of respect for buzzfeed because despite having grown on the back of very sort of clickable clickbaity content, they actually have done a lot of really good serious journalism. Don't know why. Probably they're just good people, so. Because I can't imagine that it's the profitable bit of the business. But, you know, and suddenly you realize, okay, like, even. Even if you want to be successful in that area, you have to understand that actually you. It's a wider ecosystem. And as long as the wider ecosystem is really, really rewarding the monkey brain, then it's hard for newspapers to avoid pandering to that. You know, if you write a fluffy clickbaity article with a juicy headline and you make just as much money as a serious investigative journalism report, it's very hard to make the business decision, let's do more serious investigative journalism, because frankly, doesn't pay the bills. And that's a part of the broader ecosystem problem.

Okay, but you've got. So you had an experience with Wiki Tribune. You migrated to Wiki WT Social. I want you to take that experience and then the picture of how Wikipedia was conceived of at the beginning. Imagine you had one of the many billionaires who could write a $50 billion check and. And you were gonna design the information ecosystem that would enable politics to be healthier, not perfect or true or not capital T. True. But, like, what would you do? Like, how would we constrain ourselves? I mean, again, with the model of fast food. We know what we should do individually. We should stop eating buffalo wings and potato chips. We need to eat more avocado and the like. We know how to individually conform our behavior to make ourselves healthy. What would we do to make society healthy? Like, how would we build it?

I mean, that's a tough one. It's a really, really hard problem. You know, so some of this is very deeply, deeply cultural. And that, that idea of, you know, personal growth and enrichment and enlightenment as a desired sort of way of living. Where you say, actually I do prefer being mindful of what media I'm consuming. I mean just as one example, I've said for a long time now, if I logged into Facebook one morning, I say that as if I go on there every morning. I haven't for many years now. But if I were to go on to, you know, a big social network and they said, actually we've got a new option. If you tick this box instead of showing you things we think you'll like, we're going to show you things we think you'll disagree with but that we have some signals are of quality. I would love that, I would love to see that. I would, I would find that far more interesting than what comes across my transom otherwise where you know, like I use Google News as kind of my starting point to read the news but I always do it logged out and I clear my cookies from time to time because I actually don't want it to be customized. I don't want them to show more of what I'm interested in. I want show me things I'm that you don't think I'm interested in at all. That's probably more interesting to me. And so I think if we come to value that kind of thing where we say actually what I want is not to have something that distracts me for the next hour, but something that for the next hour challenges me, then that's a start. And I think that's about education. It's about education, about education. That doesn't give us any easy answer of what to do with the billionaires pile of cash. But I think it kind of points in a direction to say, well there is, I think a demand for that. There are people who would say, you know what, I'm actually not happy with being fed one side of the issues because social media is pandering to me. Or by the way, I'm, you know, it's so funny how naive we all were. Just a few years ago I remember there was a debate about blogs. And the debate was people are only reading blogs they agree with, therefore they're becoming more polarized. And I said, hmm, don't think that's true because most of the blogs that I read, what they really enjoy doing is linking to the blogs they disagree with and arguing with them. So actually by reading blogs I'm actually getting a lot of debate, healthy, interesting debate. Well now that's all, it's all moved on from there. We don't actually choose to go and read blogs. And we don't follow the links to what the blogger we like thinks I should. You know, like I don't follow Larry Lessig's blog to see the other side of the issue that he's debating with. I just see what comes across my transom that an algorithm chose and that's problematic. Right. So now we, if you, if you ask me the same question, I'll say, actually, no, it's true, actually, I get a lot of information that isn't someone I agree with as a starting point, arguing with people who he and I or she and I would disagree with. It's actually just whatever random things the algorithm knows I'm going to click on.

So. But I'm just wondering if we just think about one of these media enterprises. I mean, you've already said, I think rightfully that it would be very hard to compete as Twitter if you didn't play into this game. But I wonder whether there's a more subtle way to think about what you could and couldn't play into this game for. So if I could control Facebook tomorrow, I would not turn off the tracking for purposes of figuring out whether they should be advertising diapers to me. I mean, I was happy when they advertised diapers to me when I had children who needed diapers. And I'm happy they don't advertise diapers to me now. Cause I don't need diapers in my life. And I'm glad somebody knows that and it's taking care of that problem. But so I wouldn't turn it off in the commercial channel, but I would turn it off in the kind of, you know, Aristotelian politics channel. Like the channel where we're trying to help people understand who they should be thinking about. And I just wonder if you, I mean, obviously you've not run Facebook, although you have a good sense of data and from WT Social and the like. I mean, what would it cost to be able to, to build that type of enterprise that, you know, could be in some sense cross subsidizing neutral discourse about politics with its deep understanding?

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, given, I mean, there are some really interesting experiments out there which I think are worth taking a look at as a starting point and you know, alternate business models. I mean, one of the things that does cheer me up a bit is that we are seeing the rise of subscriptions, payment models. And I think that's really important and helps to balance that advertising revenue and the way of that Balance is actually, you know, it's like changing the incentives of the news organization. Instead of what are people going to click on the most, it's what are people going to feel at the end of the day was worth their money, by the way. And that might not be neutrality in every case. You know, it might be that I want to buy a high quality newspaper that I agree with, but that's always been so. But you know, in terms of, if you think about that, that algorithmic piece. So one of the. There's an interesting guy I met, Canadian, met him at a, at a news. I think it was a newsgeist conference. Valley, Valley Media. Anyway, I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, he's, He's. He runs several news sites across Canada. His ideal market is a small town where the local newspapers died, but where people still think of themselves as a community. So he had one that didn't work out because everybody actually didn't think of themselves as a community. They thought they were a suburb of Toronto, so they read the Toronto newspaper. And in another case, it was a town of the similar size, say 40,000, 60,000 people. They were far enough away that they thought of themselves as a community and their newspaper had died. So he saw an opportunity there. But some of the details of how he did it were really interesting to me. So one of the things that he, he does is he does not share with any of his journalists the analytics for what they're writing, because he said if I did and if I rewarded them based on analytics, they basically would love to write more about car crashes and less about the city council meeting. And he said what he felt, his strength or where he would be successful is if his newspaper could become his news website, could become the heart and soul of the community. It's that central place. And he was having, I mean, at the time he was having success of, you know, in a town of 60,000 people, he would have 40,000 unique visitors every day. Basically every adult. Right. It was the local newspaper, which is really interesting to me because in many, many places the local newspapers dead doesn't exist or it's, it's, you know, where my. Where I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, the local newspaper is a shadow of its former self. It's actually published out of a city 100 miles away and it's largely the AP news feed and a couple of local stories, you know, but anyway, he was an interesting guy because he was doing something that I would have said is fool's errand, you know, and people Said, well, actually one of the reasons he's so successful is he used to be a really fantastic local radio ad sales guy. So he knew how to get the advertisers. And he would do all very old fashioned, you know, like he would do a huge spread with the local car dealer and he's like, in all of my, in all of my papers, we do like local events that we give out ice cream at the car dealership. And he's like, I can get, I've managed to get zero of the advertising budget from like, I don't know, Ford of Canada. But the local dealers I can always get because I'm part heart and soul of the community. So it's that kind of interesting stuff. It's hard yards, right? It's, it's very sort of on the ground work but also very interesting. And it's the sort of thing that you could say to some billionaire. Actually there's a model worth looking at and not to sort of go in, like, what was the AOL patch which tried to do local but really it didn't work out in the end. It was an interesting concept, but really sort of very kind of platformy and so on. It didn't really have soul. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunities around meeting an unmet demand for good quality local journalism. I mean, people care just as much as they ever did about what's happening in their local communities. They just have no way of finding out.

Yeah, I think the idea of not telling the journalist how their stories are performing is really critical. I got into a fight with the New York Times where we discovered at the end of this fight, which is what made them fold and made us settle the fight. You know, they had a online headline and they had a offline headline and the offline headline, the print headline was perfectly sensible and balanced and, you know, described the story, but the online headline was totally clickbait and it was defamatory on top of being clickbait. And when you look at the actual insides of what's going on in the New York Times, the journalists are helping to craft the digital headline and they are being informed about the number of shares from their stories. So they're being rewarded the more they can make it into the sort of thing that, you know, will drive people to click it as opposed to the offline headline guy who, he doesn't care if you read story four on page three or not. I mean, it's the same. They've sold the newspaper already.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what they care about is, are you going to buy the newspaper tomorrow?

Yes.

Which is much more of a deeper kind of quality question than did your monkey brain click on it because it sounded exciting.

I got to defend monkeys here. Monkeys are reptile's better. Reptile is the right.

Yes. Okay, let's go reptile.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So in the experience you've had with WT Social, what have you learned? What's the hardest part here?

So, I mean, there's a lot I've learned, and it's an ongoing pilot project

just to make sure everybody understands. This is no ads. This is.

Yeah, so a new social network. No ads, no paywall. So the business model. So where I come from is this idea that if you have the same business model as everybody else, you're going to end up in the same place as everybody else, more or less. And so by going in with no ads and. And no paywall, then the only way we get revenue, and by the way, not nearly enough, let's be clear, is if people say, you know what, at the end of the day, this is meaningful to me. This has made my life meaningfully better. And I would say one of the biggest challenges is what I would call a chicken and egg problem, right? Which is that interesting people want to invest time in producing content that other people will see. And so if you've got a small social network, people aren't really going to want to take the time if they only get 20 followers, right? And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, while at the same time as saying, I don't want to pursue kind of the clickbaity kind of approach, you also have to be interesting. You know, that's. That's also true that it has to be fun, has to be interesting. So it's been a challenge to get sort of influence on the platform because there's not really a chance of getting big. And so what we end up with actually is quite interesting. It's a small community, people who are posting thoughtful things. We're still very much in development and figuring out how do we hand as much power into that community as possible. And some of that is just pure software issues, right? So if, you know, not to bore everybody with the details of how wiki software works, but if you're going to let somebody be an admin who has the power to delete things, it needs to be really transparent so that other users can go and say, oh, well, why was that deleted? And can I debate that? And can I judge it and that sort of thing. And so if we have places on the site where if you delete something, it's actually gone and no one can see who did it and why, then that can only be a staff function because obviously, you know, it's just not feasible to share it out. So we're slowly working through those kinds of issues to give more power into the community. There's also a lot of really practical stuff like the site's not as fast as it should be. So that's actually what we've been focused on lately. So. And that's not a big learning, no deep insight. But, you know, if you want to build a successful site, it better be fast. But I think, you know, I think what we can say is that there is a community of people who are very interested in this idea of, you know, slower news, slower social media, where I'm not there because I'm addicted. And I click actually for myself personally, because I am addicted to Twitter. I use software on my laptop that blocks me from Twitter during certain hours of the day. It's called Limit, it's a chrome extension. And so I have it. So because I need to use it professionally, I do have to tweet things. It's just part of what you do. But I only allow myself during the workday, 10 minutes of Twitter. But it actually makes my use of Twitter during the work week better, just because when I get on there, I'm like a little bit sweating. Like, I can't engage with trolls. I've got to just post my thing or read a couple of fun things and get out. But you know, in that context, you know that people are desirous of more deeper and complicated engagement. I've actually seen two. Two things. Well, I've seen one thing and I'm working on another thing. So one, there's a woman and a gap who has something called Inter Intellect. And what she's done is create a community of people who meet for intellectual salons on. On Zoom, basically. So they organize their own discord. They organize through Zoom. And they have a website which probably is built on WordPress. So it's all sort of basic technologies or off the shelf stuff. But what's interesting is when they're using Eventbrite to sell tickets. So, for example, I did one. She's an old friend of mine, so I did one. And the tickets were, I think $10 each. And 50 people came and we did a Zoom chat with me and an economist, Tyler Cohen, and that was great. And obviously you look at that and you're like, well that's not a trillion dollar market cap business coming down the way, but it's growing and it's successful and it's interesting and people are paying to come to these events. And now she's got, you can become a member. So I'll do a thing and then we're going to do a members only little thing. And what's interesting about it for me is that it's really about, it's about what we're doing here, it's about having long conversations, it's about chewing on ideas and people do have a desire and they're willing to pay for that. And that isn't news exactly, but it's to me it's quite interesting as a model. And then the other thing that I've seen and this leads to what I was working on, what I am working on now as a part of WT Social, but it's kind of a side project. So since lockdown came, we started with a group of friends here in London, but then it's kind of spread to my family. We do a weekly pub quiz on Zoom. And so basically what it is, a different family member or friend in the other group creates a quiz and is the quiz master. And then we meet and we joke around and you tease each other and you do quiz questions and so on and so forth and it's a load of fun. And in fact, in the London group we really got a little over the top with dressing up and sort of everybody was quite bored. First lockdown especially, right. You don't know what to do with yourself. So what's interesting about it to me, and this is what I really sort of focus on about that experience is my family. We're quite a close family in general. But I have to say, you know, with my brothers and sisters, one sister in particular, we weren't really talking all that much, not because we had any major serious falling out, but just we have different lives and so on. And you know, we've got our family WhatsApp group where we chat a bit here and there, but suddenly every week we meet and suddenly we're joking around and we're telling stories from when we were kids and so on. And then I reflect on that, that experience every week of hearing from people and sometimes we see everybody's, you know, we've got our own kids or dogs or whatever and then my sister's boyfriend and my other sister's mother in law comes. You know, it's like that sort of thing is Quite interesting people who I, you know, their family, but I didn't ever see them or rarely saw them. And I realized, you know, if we, if you contrast that and you think, now I'm gonna ask you a question. Would you call this social media that I click like on my sister's picture of her dog, you know, on Instagram? And it's like a lot of what we call social media is not particularly social. You know, I see my, I see my sister's cute dog picture and I click like. And maybe I type, aww, very cute. That's it. You know, that's not social. That's just the lightest, possible, thinnest, like shadow of what human interaction is about. Whereas video and actually speaking to each other, seeing other people laughing. You know, where my four siblings, we're all going to have our own Zoom chat to talk about mom and dad and health issues and things like that. I hope mom's not watching. But, you know, it's like normal, normal stuff that you would do that we're now doing over technology because it's just, it works. And that's kind of interesting and amazing. So the second thing I'm working on is I'm doing something called Quiz Night beyond, which is actually a quiz website, but where you do it socially. So on Zoom, you just read out the questions, this has got the questions in the middle and so on. So it's that kind of thing that I'm interested in exploring. You know, sort of like if you want to fix a Facebook. I'm not convinced that a WT social, which, here's the way I would describe it right now it's a pretty straightforward social networking platform that's a little bit feature poor. So you can post, you can comment, you can like, you can share, you can friend, you can follow all the standard features. But I'm not convinced that just replicating sort of that with a different business model is actually driving completely in the right direction if you don't add some elements that are actually more deep, more thoughtful, more engaging. So one of the things I want to do, but I'm not actively working on it yet because I've got a small team, is to sort of say, okay, can we, you know, can we do some social spaces that are like a group on Facebook, but instead of driving to have a million members and as many clicks as possible, we Drive to have 100 members who are willing to pay a little bit of money each month to meet with their group. That's an interesting person or interesting thing, like My example, which is completely fictitious, but it just captivated me. On WT Social, there's a beekeeping subwiki. We call it a group a subwiki. And I think it's got about 100 members. It's not active. Right. Like much, I'm like, wow, a hundred people signed up and thought, oh, yes, I'm interested in beekeeping. And so now I suddenly think, well, surely somewhere in the world there's a really interesting, fun beekeeper who's an expert in beekeeping who would love not to try to make a million dollars. Right. But who, you know, if people would pay five bucks each, would host a weekly Q and A, get a little group going of 20, 30 people who love to come in and talk about their bees and, you know, get advice from each other and from someone, an expert, and then suddenly you got, wow, something that's really different and really social. So that's getting pretty far away from questions about news and media and traditional social networking. But it's kind of where my mind has gone lately is to say a part of it is if we want to move beyond sort of addiction and clickbait. Right. I think we have to really start to think about how do we leverage technology to get into more richer experiences that aren't as amenable to that kind of manipulation. Yeah.

So the word you used, I think

is so valuable is slow down, slow it down.

I mean, you know, there's a great slow food movement which is responsive to the fast food addictions. There's a slow democracy movement that says, let's just slow down where we do democracy. Because if we can do democracy in places like this or, you know, podcasts in general or narrative form or conversations with friends, we as humans are pretty good at it. Like, we can hear all sides and we can begin to make a judgment. It's only in the Twitter space where we can be tweaked, that we don't

do it very well.

So I love the idea of deepening it, slow it down. And it's sort of what Pandemic taught us. All of a sudden, we had all this time and we could think in a different way, because we did have that time we weren't jumping to an airplane, that maybe this is helpful. One last business model question, just to close the loop on the business model. So imagine one of the almost trillionaires said, okay, here's the thing. I will give everybody who's a member of a non ad supported, I want to say public media. And by that I just mean that it's just trying to think about public issues. Network everybody in those. I'll give you a $100 voucher and at the end of a quarter you can just allocate your voucher however you want to. You can give it to, as you put it, people who are doing sites that are doing good. You can just allocate it in a way that's feeding what you think you need in your, as you put it nicely, the Aristotelian side of your brain. I mean, what would the number have to be to begin to be competitive with the idea of what you have to live with with Facebook or the link like,

so give $100 to who to members.

So everybody on WT gets $100 and then they can allocate it to any, you know, to W.T. or they could allocate it anywhere they want. But they're allocating it to news sources that are committed not to be ad driven news sources. So it's like a compensation for non ad drivers.

Really interesting. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting model because normally you would think they would just. The billionaire would choose 20, you know, I don't know if you know, the Texas Tribune is an example. It's a nonprofit news site that's done quite well, I think. They don't have ads, I'm not really clear. But anyway, but good quality work, you know, rather than saying give it to the readers, basically. That's quite interesting.

Yeah, but you create a market for non ad driven news production because you know that the readers have resources. I mean, we all have resources to some extent, but this would be many more dollars of resources that we, you know, it's a wasted coupon. We'll turn it over for this purpose. Like I want to drive my supported. But, but the question would be, could you, could you inspire the right kind of norm? Because it can't be just a popularity context because that's back to the kind of reptile brain. It's gotta be more. Is this really giving me what I, what I want to understand what's going on in politics or my local community?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting and I think, you know, one of the, one of the problems that, that could help to address. So let's go back to my hometown newspaper where I grew up. So Huntsville, Alabama, Huntsville Times. And I was chatting with my mom about the problem and you know, she's like, yeah, the paper is ridiculous anymore. There's almost nothing local in it. And it's the AP Newswire and And also she said, it's. It's like in the old days, it was one of those advertising circulars which is, you know, it's still a good technology for delivering the local grocery store ads and so on, but the journalism is gone and it only comes up, I think, three days a week, you know, sort of Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. So it used to be a daily newspaper. And I said, yeah, like, what's really exciting to me is that now we're starting to see the rise of subscriptions and people paying. And she's like, I wouldn't pay for it. It's terrible. And suddenly it's like, oh, right. Before you can get people to pay for it, you actually got to invest ahead of time and actually build a newspaper worth paying for, which is highly risky given that people stopped paying for newspapers for quite some time. And so a model like that gets kind of interesting is to say, no, actually that there's a way to. If you can get the memory, maybe the way to do it is some sort of a matching model, you know, to say, right? And say to my mother, Doris, if you subscribe at a hundred dollars a year, then billionaire is going to chip in another hundred to a local. Say, it doesn't have to be local. The way you put it, it could be a lot of different things. But I think that's. That's kind of an interesting model, right? Just to say, you know, trust people to pay for things that is meaningful to them and it suddenly then makes it a lot more viable for someone to say, okay, actually I'm the owner or I'm a startup. I'm going to. Whether it's a for profit or nonprofit startups or startups, I'm going to launch this thing. But right now I don't see a viable business model. But actually, if somebody's going to double the reader's contribution, maybe this could work. Could be quite interesting.

Jimmy, I'm really grateful for your time and it's really wonderful to see you. It's been too long.

Yes, it's been too long. But now we have video.

So we have video.

I don't just have to click like on your dog.

All right, thanks for giving us your time.

Okay. All right, lovely. Great. Bye.

Bye. That's our conversation with Jimmy Wells, founder

of Wikipedia and of course, one of the leaders in the free software and free culture movement. The conversation we had focuses, in my view, the biggest problem we as a democracy face. And that problem is how do we produce a culture for public understanding that helps us understand things in a common way, not necessarily agree, but at least see the same set of facts. And this problem, which of course has been with us for many years and is a problem which is half of my latest book, they don't represent us, is a problem which the January 6 events makes even more salient. And so in these conversations, another way we're going to think more, more deeply about another way to bring about understanding other than the way we have right now, given the way we have right now, is not working well. So stay tuned to this podcast for those conversations. These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens Us. You can find us on the webcitizens us anotherway. There's a place there to share these podcasts, which you can find everywhere. We're not so great as to be exclusive to anyone, which is good. It's not quite as remunerative, but still you can find us and share us and give us feedback and ideas. What should we be looking at? How should we be going deeper? Another dimension of these conversations that we're going to begin to explore is a part that's implicit in the title of our organization, but that we haven't thought enough about what it means to be equal citizens. This issue has been triggered for me recently as I've thought more about a set of decisions by our Supreme Court in cases called the Insular cases, which essentially said there are two classes of citizens. There are citizens in territories, and there are citizens in the United States. And when territories were understood to be regions that were going to become part of the United States, the difference between those citizens was not as significant. But when territories began to include places like Puerto Rico, for a brief time, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, really the whole of the greater United States, which is the kind of colonial United States which was born really in 1898, over a course of a couple weeks, when we, you know, fight with Spain, became masters over these extraordinary regions and chose not to treat them as equal nations or as states, potential states, but as colonies, that a very different idea of citizen began to emerge, an idea which was not equal, but dominant. There were citizens who were entitled to all the rights of citizens. And of course, initially that was just white men, but eventually it was white men and women. And in proper United States, the United States, that have states, at least it was African Americans as well. But outside of the proper United States, outside of those states, these other people were thought of politically as lesser. It's astonishing, the idea that that decision made in 1901, five years after Plessy vs Ferguson, the decision that upheld separate but equal in the context of public accommodations. It's astonishing that that decision, affirming the inequality of persons based on race and culture, explicitly in the opinion of downs based on race and culture, continues to be at the center of American jurisprudence. So that's a long way to introduce what will be another thread in these conversations. If we really were committed to the idea of equal citizens, if we were really committed to the idea that every human, not to be species about it, but every human within the domain of America was entitled to equal status as a citizen, what would that mean? How would the world change then? Because that's nothing at all like what we have now. Okay? That's a promise for the future. This is Larry Lessig ending this episode with Jimmy Wells. Until the next time, thanks for listening.

Sa.