S5E19: Lifeboats: Eli Pariser

This is Larry Lessig. So all of us have a pretty

good idea about the miserable story of the history of the Internet.

Though the protocol was launched in 1983, it's 15 years after that that the platform really begins to enter mainstream public life. And after the turn of the century, there's a brief but critical of enormous hope. I, of course, was a doomer from the start about the Internet. My first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace celebrated the values that the Internet then embraced. But the doom I promised was that these values would be corrupted by the influence of both commerce and government, and especially commerce and government working together. Yet mine was the minority view. There was endless optimism everywhere, and no doubt there was lots to feed that optimism. As we heard in the conversation with Ben Smith, there was an explosion in viral media, which we should understand is media that spreads because people want to spread it. In this sense, that media was deeply democratic. It wasn't the elite editors at CBS or NBC that were deciding what we could watch and what we couldn't watch. And it was my friend pointing me to something that she thought I would like to see, and me doing the same for her and 15 other people, or the collective assessment of thousands upvoting content or otherwise making it popular on whatever platform it happened to live on. The birth of the Internet in the mind of the public was this new and authentic and largely great way to share with you each other. And that was a reason for endless hope. And then it all began to change. If I had to summarize how or why it had to change, I'd say something like this. The Internet got a business model, advertising. And that business model drove the platforms to find ways to maximize engagement. At first, it was viral geniuses that deployed their art to best maximize engagement. They had a sense about what was going to take off, what kind of content was likely to trigger the reaction of many, many people. But slowly the platforms learned that machines could actually do that engagement game better. Increasingly sophisticated AI learned how best to addict us, to draw us in, to send us down rabbit holes of content. And unfortunately for us, the kind of did that best was the worst sort of content for us as individuals or as citizens, like the fast food or processed food industry learned long ago, it just turns out that the most addictive food for the human body as it has evolved turns out not to be the healthiest food for the human body as it has evolved. And so too did the digital engagement and industry learn exactly the same thing. That the most addictive content for the human mind is not the healthiest content

for the human mind.

Yet as the industry raced to find ever more addictive content for us to consume, there were some pushing it in the other way. My guest today is one of those some. Elijah Pariser was born to the world of viral media just after 9 11. As you'll hear in our conversation after the attacks on that tragic day, he decided to engage constructively with how best we should respond. He stood up a website about multilateralism in response to those attacks. That website went viral in the sense

of viral circa 2001.

He then moved to MoveOn, developing an extraordinary video campaign, Bush in 30 Seconds, a leading MoveOn to become the most important online progressive movement in the history of this nation. But as you'll hear, as Eli watched what the web was becoming, he became fearful it was becoming so much less than it should be. In 2011, he wrote an extraordinary book that glimpsed the future of the ugly Internet, the Filter Bubble, demonstrating how search engines were crafting a different picture of the world for each of us and how the ideals of a common conversation to resolve a common problem were not just ideals that did not fit the business model of the Internet. They never would. And then to counter this dynamic, or what we can think of as the buzzfeed dynamic, the go viral whatever it takes dynamic, he started Upworthy, a site devoted to sharing content that brings us together or helps us understand as one people better. And then since 2018, he has been working on Civic Signals, a site with the goal of creating more public friendly online spaces. If there's hope for health, it will come from the kind of spaces that these projects construct, if at least they can be successful. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation with one of my heroes in the healthy Internet movement, Eli Pariser. Stay tuned.

Eli, thank you so much for talking. So you've had an extraordinary career, front row in the life of the Internet, and both from its moment when we all thought it had enormous potential to do good, to the moment when you kind of recognized the architecture of why it wouldn't necessarily do good to the place you are right now where you're trying to figure out how to rebuild it or to rebuild this to make it so it does do good. But let's start at the beginning. You actually get involved online around the 911 events where you're trying to achieve the impossible. This just shows how optimistic and naive you were convincing America not to respond to 911 in violence, to find a more constructive way to respond. But tell us a little bit about that Story what happened and what got you going?

Yeah, I mean, so I should say like I was, I grew up as someone who was a geek and like excited about these new technologies and read my Wired magazine and at the same time someone who my parents were teachers and felt like figuring out how to harness this amazing new tool on behalf of healthier communities was a really cool kind of thing to do. And so I was working at a nonprofit as the IT guy when the 911 attacks happened and after going through the initial shock and horror, somehow very quickly latched onto this thought that this was kind of one of those moments in history when things could go a number of different directions and that one of the directions they might go is kind of pretty bad military adventurism. And maybe if enough of us had enough presence of mind in that moment, we could push it in a. We could stop that. So, you know, I'm like a 20 year old activist at this point who knows how to code HTML. And I just put up a website that was kind of making this argument about multilateralism and bringing the world together to stop terrorism versus just going it alone. So this is back dial up modem era. And I put the website up and sent it to some friends and logged off for four days because that's what I guess I did then. And when I logged back on like four days later, uh, you know, I'll never forget, it was sort of like the, the progress bar of how many emails left to download kept going backwards and it was like, you know, I thought I had 50 and then I thought I had 300 and then I thought I had 4,000. And yeah, that was like my first kind of viral, viral moment on the Internet. But the email had circulated hugely. There were 50,000 people who had signed the petition. And I started getting, you know, emails in all these different languages saying like, what are we going to do about this? And so, you know, it's amazing to me and it's still amazing like the ability of someone who's 20 and has no resources and no connections to find a huge group of people. It was remarkable. And that's what kind of got me into this. And now it's much more complicated. But there was something magical about sort of that, that ability.

Yeah.

And what's striking about that success is that it was all what we would call organic growth. Right. It was all people who saw your website and shared it with their friends, and their friends shared it with their friends. It's the kind of beautiful image of how ideas would spread in the Context of the Internet.

Totally. And I had kind of marinated in and a bunch of ideas about how that was, if not inevitable, at least a strong. I mean, the word that we did always used to use about the Internet was democratizing. It was going to be this democratizing force and power was going to move outward. And here was an example of that. And that was kind of like the frame that I had in my head at that time for what was happening.

And I assume there was no advertising tied to your. You didn't buy ads to kind of sell your petition?

No, I didn't have. I mean, I didn't have any money to do that. I mean, it was literally free. And it wasn't. I mean, honestly, it wasn't like a concept that I would have had even had it been possible. Right. Like I, I was, I was just playing with something and, and striking a court.

Okay, so you're extra strongly successful with that. Obviously, then you must have become. Got come to the radar of MoveOn, which had been started before that by Wes and Joan, who had this brilliant idea to put together a list to get Congress to move on from the craziness of trying to impeach President Clinton. There were a lot of really serious problems. The point was. And just censure the guy and move on. So they must have seen your success. And did they reach out to you and say, why don't you take your magic, bring your magic here to move on?

Yeah, so I had actually, we sort of had a nice. Like, I had reached out to them because I was like, I'm 20 and I have this half a million people who are starting to write me emails asking me, like, what are we going to do next? I don't know. And I had seen Move on doing a similar style of organizing, you know, and we quickly hit it off and I joined initially to focus on kind of foreign policy what became the Iraq war movement.

But then at least Wikipedia thinks you did Bush in 30 seconds. Is that true?

That's true. Yeah. No. So basically we. That was in 2004. We try to stop the war. It's another really exciting. I mean, this is also kind of a moment where conservatism was extremely sort of impossible to imagine now. Ascendant in the sense that there were 70 or 80% approval ratings for a president, which hasn't happened since then. And people were burning French fries or whatever. There's just kind of this fever. And so the potential. So the Iraq war movement was all the more remarkable in that context, which was like A bunch of people who were not in line with that managed to create a really broad multi class anti war protest movement and had millions of people on the streets, but did not stop the war. And so then the project became political and. And we decided to do this project called Bush in 30 seconds, which was like upload, make your own political ad and upload it to our website and people will vote on it. Which at the time was just not a concept that anyone had ever thought of to crowdsource advertisements.

Yeah, and I mean I thought it was incredible. I stole all of the ads. I still have them on my machine and I watched some of them, my favorites. One of the most successful crowdsourcing efforts ever, I think, even since I don't know that I've seen. I mean, because the number of really great ads, I mean, was what? I mean, there's some really great, great ads. But yeah, the number of really great ads is really extraordinary.

Yeah, no, it was a really strong. I mean this is pre YouTube, you know. So yeah, there were just a whole bunch of really great creators. And again, and you were part of this movement too. There's just a sense of. There's so much creativity out there that's been gatekept by the existing institutional structures and if we can only get them out of the way, there's going to be. It's funny to look back on it and think, oh, that was really good. Because at the time it felt like the tip of the iceberg. This is just the start of what's going to be this amazing efflorescence of creativity and voices coming online

and it just seemed all good. Couldn't imagine how it was going to spin bad. So you then stay and move on and you become president of the board and this becomes your gig. When did you start? What's the birth of the skepticism that's expressed so powerfully? And still one of the main books to read about the era, Filter Bubble, which doesn't come out I guess until 2011 or sometime like that.

So I think it started there's a guy named Matt Hinman who somehow I saw some writing that he was doing about the blogosphere and there was just this weird moment. So the left wing blogosphere, or really the blogosphere as a whole, came up during the similar time and had this kind of similar political ethos. And Marcos Molitsis, who did F Coast, wrote this book called Crashing the Gates or something that was sort of this like, we're going to get the gatekeepers out of there. But there was this weird thing that Matt pointed out where all of a sudden 2006, 2007, there stopped being new blogs that really broke out. People were making them, but there was this long period where you could just build your own blog and you could become famous and it just sort of would happen organically. And at some point that just froze. And so I thought that was really interesting and kind of eerie and ominous and pushed against a lot of the other thinking that I was thinking about. And his argument was that the way that the web was structured was not inherently democratizing, that actually there were some strong forces that were pointing toward centralization. And if PageRank is the way that people find links, if Google is the way that people find links, and the New York Times gets linked to a lot, but it doesn't link out a lot, then you're going to have this kind of growing New York Times supremacy. And that's true of smaller entities as well. I think hearing that got me thinking about power and these networks. And I think maybe just poked a little bit at some of the naivete of what I had been feeling was this just dramatically democratic thing.

So you started experimenting to demonstrate that there was such a thing as a bubble.

Filter Bubble, Yes. And somewhere in there, I mean, I read code somewhere in there. And that also was a contributing thing in my mind because in that book, which was very important for me, and thank you. The notion, I just had this other thought about, okay, well, if code is law, like who's writing the laws here? And I think seeing Facebook take off and seeing Yahoo and some of the other just starting to notice that a lot of the digital laws were being written by these advertising companies. That was also something that started to make me wonder about whether this was going to turn out the way that we thought it. So anyway, so really what happened was MoveOn was an email based organization, but our members increasingly were on Facebook. And so I got very interested in like, well, how do we adapt to this new medium? And what we started to realize was like, oh, it's not as simple as just like putting MoveOn petition links on this on Facebook. Because people don't click or share move on petition links on Facebook. What they want on Facebook is media, it seems like. And they want to just like they're not looking to go do something. They're. Which is what the mode you're in an email. They're looking to like consume content. And so, and so that got me thinking about like, well, this is, this is a really important difference. And what does it Mean, if increasingly both media and reaching people are owned by this company that has this algorithm that's personalized, that was really kind of like the on ramp to playing with Facebook and starting to think about what are the political dynamics of the Facebook algorithm.

When you first began to see the bubble, were you surprised by it, or did you. By the time you started testing for it, you're pretty sure you're going to see what you saw. You must have had a moment where you sat there and just typed a search and asked somebody to type the same search on their laptop. Maybe you guys were all similar, so it wouldn't have been very different. Or even on an incognito.

Yeah, no, I mean, that was actually. I think Facebook behaved kind of like I thought, but I felt like people weren't paying attention to what it meant. And then Google, you know, when I found out that Google was also using kind of like user data to personalize itself, that was surprising. And, you know, like, I still tell people that today, and they're shocked. Like, I think there is some fundamental way in which the way that people understand what Google does is different than what Google is actually doing for some use cases. And people are not clear about that. But, you know, I had someone. It was around the protests in the Arab Spring, and I had someone Google. I had a bunch of people Google Egypt and send me screenshots. I was really surprised by the variety of screenshots I got because the group was pretty demographically similar. It wasn't like a wildly split group. And for some of them, Arab Spring content was right at the top, and for some of them, it didn't exist. And so that was a kind of like, that was a big moment for me in realizing it felt like everyone understands that everyone's view of Facebook is going to be different. But the idea that we're looking at this portal that's ostensibly sort of meritocratically raising the truth, and it's different for everyone. That set some alarm bells off for me for sure.

I remember meeting you when we were at a similar event. We were at the same event, and you were describing this, and you had this really kind of terrified sense about you. You were like, how do we do democracy in a world where everybody sees a different set of facts? And it was obviously something that those of us who think about this now think about all the time. But I. But I remember feeling you were one of the first people that I ever came across who was making it tangible. And I remember feeling I didn't have an Answer for you. I don't know what we do in a world where people have different views of the world because they're being fed different views based on these judgments that the algorithm is making about it.

Yeah, I mean, I think what

I

was really trying to raise an alarm about the way we were structuring information systems. And I should say this conversation about echo chambers or bubbles or whatever you want to call them, I call them filter bubbles is old. I remember reading Nick Negroponte, the Media Lab guy In the 90s, at some point saying everybody's going to have their own personalized newspaper and you won't be able to believe it. But I think what was different was seeing it happen, and not only seeing it happen, but seeing it happen without anyone really thinking about, well, what does that mean for democracy? Where is this heading us? And that's what I was trying to call attention to.

Yeah, I mean I was at a conference at Yale in the middle 90s, maybe 95, and Eugene Volok and Cass Sunstein wrote these competing essays about the Daily Me. But what was missing at that stage was understanding why. What would the technical architecture be that would actually produce that difference and what would be driving it. Now what's interesting about the filter bubble is you can imagine like the first stage of the filter bubble is just the byproduct of the search engine trying to figure out what sort of things you want to see. But the second stage of the filter bubble is when you've got advertising driven platforms that are trying to pull you in to hook you on content because they know that this type of content will make you much more likely to consume even more content. So to drive you down some rabbit hole. So you become somebody who watches this thing 24, 7. Well, if one could. But the point is that then it's not just a kind of passive consequence of just people having different things that they're interested in. Now you're constructing the public that is going to have these different views and maximizing that difference because that turns out to be the most profitable for the platform.

Yeah. And the feedback loops between those, those things are significant. Sort of user, platform, algorithm and media. I think even when I wrote the book, I initially sort of thought of them as set things, but in reality, and having run a media company at one point, the media companies change their behavior based on the incentives set by the algorithm. That changes what users see, which in turn tases their identity, which then, or how they see their identity, which then changes their media preferences. And so all of these things Become interlinked in this way that's kind of self reinforcing.

Yeah, it's self reinforcing. But again, I imagine I didn't get to meet you in the middle of that recognition, especially when you're running upworthy, but even more scary for the consequences of democracy. I mean, it's one thing to like recognize you're being passively sorted based on your preferences, but when you're actively being constructed based on what turns out to sell the most ads, we have no historical basis for understanding whether this is going to be good or bad. And all the intuitions are it would be bad.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think the thing that popped out to me when I was doing the filter bubble research was just how unlikely it was that a media environment that was constructed purely around commercial ends was going to serve all of the social ends that we actually implicitly were expecting of media at that time. Even in America, even in the free market society that we're in, still, we had this expectation that of course you wouldn't just put junk on the front page of your newspaper because there's a duty. At the same time, there's no interest in holding those platforms to any sense of a similar duty. And so when you put those things side by side, let alone a country that actually invested in public media, like most other countries of our wealth and scale, it looks really, really different as an approach to how you do media.

Yeah, I mean, if you think your job is to be news director of CBS News in 1975, there's a lot of judgments you make about what's going to be on the news or not. And in 1975, those judgments are just basically what does it make sense for people to understand? What do they need to know? And it's not like, how do I turn them into right wing crazies or left wing crazies. And I don't really have any interest in making sure they watch 10 times the amount of news that they're watching right now, because it's just a couple slices during the day when they're going to see the news and that's it. So the incentives of that editor are very different from the incentives of the guy running the Facebook newsfeed, because that guy or that woman is deeply invested in making sure that you go from 30 minutes to an hour to two hours to three hours. And the AI that does it, of course, doesn't even know what the thing is that they're trying to feed you. They're just Testing which things to feed you that turn you into a crazy person as opposed to balanced person. Now, this is the part of the story I'd not really thought of when I was thinking about you and your history before. And that is the so one of the early news content organizations that tried to leverage this obviously was buzzfeed. And buzzfeed itself goes through this kind of innocent cycle early in BuzzFeed's career. I think there's like this, the quiz where you have to tell the color of some dress and people, two thirds saw it as violet and the other third saw it as gray or whatever or some weird thing about that. And that exploded and all of a sudden everybody's sharing it and they're so excited about how amazing this platform is. And we're all different, that we all get along because of this. And then obviously it shifts into a very different direction as it begins to build on the business model of how do we get people engaged and it's less concerned about the edifying content that it might be sharing. Was that what motivated your thought that maybe upworthy could. What was the set of thoughts that got you to think what we need to do now is to get upworthy as opposed to buzzfeed or anything else at the top there?

Yeah. So I mean, coming out of writing the filter bubble I was interested in, I felt like, okay, I'm not probably going to change Facebook's ranking priorities or maybe like I've tried my. I've made a book length argument about why Facebook should change Facebook's ranking priorities, but let's suppose that it doesn't. And how would we elevate content about sort of civically valuable, civically important issues in an engagement feed based system? And I was sort of worried about two things. One was kind of the siloing and kind of rabbit hole problem, but the other piece was I was kind of equally worried. And it's funny because this is sort of the trajectory that Facebook's gone on, actually, now that I think about it. But I was equally worried that all the political stuff was just going to go away entirely and that it was just entertainment over politics was going to win every time. And so Facebook actually, if you look at the last 15 years, basically went in the one direction, which was like, we're going to amp up silos and then now they're in the other direction where they're like, turn all of the politics off. We don't want anyone to ever say anything about politics. We're just going to decrease the traffic to Anything that's hard news. But Upworthy was kind of trying to figure out, how do you do that? So how do you take a piece of content about climate change and get it in front of a million people in what we felt was a hostile environment for that kind of thing? And learned a lot about Facebook and about media in that journey and ended up concluding that wasn't the right structure. VC backed media has its own sort of incentive problems.

But in the technology of Upworthy, I mean, buzzfeed goes early on, from basically the intuition of the editors to trying to systematize feedback loops. Was Upworthy like a bunch of good souls just deciding which content should go up? Or were there AB testing on stuff?

Yeah, no, we were doing ab testing a lot and trying to figure out how do we present these ideas in a way that they will be most palatable to folks online to share. I think we were part of the same kind of cohort, but for us, we felt like it was a differentiation to be exclusively focused on stuff that had some kind of meaningfulness to it. And so the dress, which was actually, I think Ben Smith's book Traffic, covers this whole era pretty well. And yeah, he sort of talks about the dress as the sort of last fun argument that the Internet had. Part of the fun of it was that it divided people. It was very divisive, but it was randomly divisive. And it was divisive over something that had no real world meaning. So you could kind of yell and join a tribe, but the tribe wasn't correlated with your normal tribe. And the yelling didn't. Wasn't serious. And it did feel that way. But we were kind of trying to go in this direction of, well, how do we bring people together around a little more socially relevant stuff.

But did you find that there was a strategy to bringing diverse ideological people together and seeing what might be thought of as ideologically predictable stories differently? I remember Upworthy a lot of really great stories that me on the left loved seeing. Lift it up, right? Was there a trick to like, getting people who are not on the left to see them and be excited about them?

Well, we were. I mean, we. We were pretty well read, you know, not deep into conservative land, but we reached a whole bunch of. Part of the purpose of the thing was like, most people are just not that interested in politics at all, not that interested in news at all. It's easy to forget in our online circles that that's true. Right. But like most people consume a vanishingly small amount of hard news in America, so We were trying to provide a kind of entry point that was around storytelling and around characters and around kind of bits of emotion, get you into thinking about climate change at all, rather than the normal approach, which would be something either catastrophic or heavily data driven. That tends to kind of turn people off. So, I mean, I think that that works for a lot of people. It doesn't work for getting extreme partisans together. But I think if you can just engage people around, here are some compelling stories about the world with a character you're rooting for or whatever. That does work.

So I assume it's fair to say that Upworthy didn't prove to be the solution to our problem and that you entered a stage where you realize you're going to have to do a lot of really deep thinking and experimenting. I think what's interesting about New Public is its keen desire to experiment. What was that transition like and where do you think you are now? And what's the reason to be hopeful that there's a lifeboat or lifeboats out of this that gives us what we thought we had.

Well, going to the lifeboats for a second, I mean, if you want to capture the overall arc that we've talked about so far, I think there is a way in which there was something to the early Internet that MoveOn was a part of because it was based on email, which was an open protocol, not owned by a company that, while I don't think it was ideologically neutral, I do think that it didn't bake in a bunch of the commercial incentives that have turned out to be really poisonous. And then we had this encroachment of Facebook, which we talked about. And then we had sort of the Facebook era. And I spent a while trying to convince Facebook to be different and these big platforms trying to be different. And then I spent a while being like, well, I guess we live in their world. We've just got to figure out the best way to do what we want to do in Facebook's world. I think where I ended up at the end of all that was, this isn't viable. We cannot structure our public sphere this way if we want to continue to be working pluralistic democracy, it's just not going to happen. Never happened in history. And if we don't take a bigger step backwards and start to think about how we get off this cruise ship or boat and onto something else, we're never going to be able to get the Titanic to reform itself from within. That's where New Public started heading, which is, I think there's Two pieces there. One is how do we start from a place of formulating what is the media environment, what is the digital structure that we need in order to accomplish the goals that we have as a society, and how do we work backwards from that? And it's not just. It's not to say that there isn't a role for big advertising companies. We can't depend on them entirely to be the conversational spaces that we need. And then two, I think it actually does hark back a bit to what was interesting about that early Internet moment, which is I do think there are some dynamics to open systems, open protocol based systems that are different than centralized advertising monopolies. And I think there's an exciting movement right now toward rediscovering and reimagining the Internet built on some of those ideas.

So what do they look like? What are the most exciting things coming out?

So I think Mastodon and BlueSky are two emergent networks that are capturing some of those principles and applying them to social media. Are they great and will they solve all of society's problems? Not yet, but I think the thing that they do do is they are starting to offer examples of what it would look like to declare independence from having Mark Zuckerberg decide what everyone sees and doesn't see and start to make those decisions in a more actually democratic or self governed way. And I think that's like.

Let me just ask it. Yeah, let me just pushed a little bit on that point. So there's a difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Elon Musk is pushing Twitter in a direction that has a very self conscious political spin to it. He has a conception of what he wants his page to look like. Zuckerberg is just turning the decision over to the AI to decide what's the right mix of content that's going to get people really engaged. Both of those, I think we agree, are not good, but they're not good for different reasons. Right. And so which are you most concerned about, the Zuckerbergs or the Elon Musks?

I actually think in the long run they probably converge because I think they're both. I think the fundamental thing that is true about them is that they are homogenous, huge centralized systems. And I don't think you can build democracies inside of homogenous, huge centralized systems. Like I think if the, the thing that de Tocqueville discovered in America when he came here and looked around was this like overlay of lots of different weird little Institutional structures that hadn't existed in Europe but was starting to take place here. And there were grange halls and you know, all the farmers unions and all these little. So I think that is the template for the kind of structures that we want. And I guess I think sort of the Mark Zuckerberg ends up becoming the Elon Musk in some way. And that at some point someone's going to, with a centralized grasp on power is going to make decisions that we don't like. And we can either decide that we're okay with that as a kind of autocratic structure that we're participating in, or we can decide that we're not. And the there need to be a bunch of more self governed and overlaid systems. Now the next question that comes is like, isn't that just a bunch of homogenous groups? And I think it could be, but I think it doesn't have to be. Right. And so that's why at New Public our focus is on kind of what we call digital public spaces, but basically places where you do get some cross mixing of groups and tribes, but also kind of at a scale where they're governable and self government.

Yeah.

So let's say take your wildest dreams, like what the world looks like if you're wildly successful. How do those communities relate to the continuing existence of something like Facebook or Fox News or msnbc? Do you imagine them displacing that? Do you imagine attention shifting to them over that? What's the stable long term story?

I guess I sort of feel like, I think a lot about churches and other kinds of civic institutions that you don't necessarily spend most of your time in, but they call out a certain kind of way of being in you. And I think you don't have to spend the vast majority of your time. Mostly people are going to malls and going to restaurants and not being upstanding citizens with their lives. We've all got other stuff to do. But spending a little bit of time in these spaces reorients our beliefs about what's possible to do together and what's possible to do across business, across different. So that's kind of like the place that I would want to start is, you know, and I think there are lots of places in people's lives that are really meaningful, that are really important where you could do that. So for example, like public schools, as messed up as they are in the United States, still are places where people end up in proximity with a bunch of other people across class, across race, and often across political difference. But with a very shared, very, very like acute shared interest. Right. Nobody is really doing a whole lot of work to think about how do we take the whole sort of digital aura of a public school and bring it together in a more positive way. That's not anyone's job, but to me, it's the kind of digital institution that absolutely needs to exist and that could produce a lot of social benefit. Local newspapers are another example where you sort of have the old broadcast model declining. But I grew up in a small town and where is the place where we have a thoughtful conversation to each other, about each other that still hasn't really been solved as a digital problem? And if you're trying to do it with a Facebook group, you end up optimizing for memes and the most conflict. There's a better way to do that too. So I really think you don't have to spend most of your time there in order to, in order to relate differently. And then I also think there's just kind of this virtuous cycle of belonging where so much of why people are drawn to national federal politics. And by the way, this is like a little mea culpa thing for me. I think when I look back at Move on, there's so much that I'm proud of, but one thing I'm not proud of or that I think we contributed to negatively is the federalization of politics. And I guess in today's era it's like I could spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince Joe Manchin to think like I do. And it's just never. I'm never going to convince Joe Manchin. Whereas if I direct that energy at my local district member, I have a fighting chance of actually influencing that person or changing how they think. And so because of the media structures that we've been living in lately, everyone's been sucked into these kind of hyper partisan federalized identities. And what's interesting about local politics is if you can reorient local politics there, it's just weirder, right? And there are these weird coalitions that pop up and who's for dogs in the park and who's against dogs doesn't line up neatly and you start to come into contact with people who aren't just part of the mass on the other side. So I guess I feel like that's another thing we need our media system to do is kind of reorient attention away from sort of brand name federal politics and towards some of this like local stuff, which is valuable to people because it actually affects our lives and it's really interesting when that happens. Right. Like, you know, so anyway, that's, that's, that's a place that I can see a lot of promise.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if you know the book Broken News by Chris Style heard about that come out, but I, you will find if, when you read it, you're going to find that there's a lot of overlap here. Because his main point is the loss of local journalism means we spend less time in places where we're not politically polarized because. Exactly. As you would say, people have weird views about dog parks and they're not left and right. And instead we've focused most of our attention in the national news context, which is cheaper per person to do in local news and it's more polarizing and so that we've got to find a way to revitalize. But it sounds like you're building the infrastructure of local revitalization. Right? I mean that, that's what. So in 10 years, when we look back and recognize new public has saved democracy around the world, like what will the inflection points of that look like that you've gotten, you know, 5 million people who are spending time in spaces curated or incentivized or inspired by new public.

Well, so we want to make it easier for people and especially for kind of the. Usually when there's a healthy heterogeneous community, there's like a person or a few people who make it happen. And so we want to make those people's lives easier by providing them with kind of open source tools and design patterns that help them do that. And that's a big departure from the way that we have organized. You have to ask yourself a whole bunch of questions in order to do that. Well, so we're used to kind of deferring to Mark Zuckerberg to say here's what content is okay and not okay. How do we facilitate without making it annoying or laborious communities doing that for themselves and setting their guidelines for themselves and making that transparent to everyone for themselves, that's achievable. Right. And in the meantime, these infrastructures, the sort of open protocols like email that can make this all sort of scalable are really coming along. And so we want to help kind of aid that effort by making it easier for people to solve actual community problems with those kinds of tools. So 10 years from now, people are part of a bunch of, of fora that are meaningful for them, that help them in their lives, that provide some information or some context that they wouldn't otherwise have. And probably honestly, like no one's ever going to. If we do this job well, it'll sort of be pretty mundane, right? Like it's not going to be people just, oh, there are, I guess there aren't ads that are distorting my experience on this platform. I'm just connecting with people, but people will be focused on the content and that's great. I think if we're doing our job well, what that feels like is just a society where people are connecting with each other about the problems in front of them rather than being impeded by the technologies in front of them.

So the business model is nonprofit. You have to get funders to give you the money to build this. Is there a different business model that might.

Yeah, well, so I think we are part of. We're a nonprofit, but we're aiding a whole kind of cohort of new startups, some of which are nonprofit, some of which are kind of B Corp type organizations, some of which have kept revenues, but all of which sort of renounce the goal of ever being the one tower of Sauron looming over the digital landscape and are trying to figure out a different model. I mean, I just think I've been very influenced also by Eleanor Ostrom, who's an economist. And the thing I love about her is one I read the Tragedy of the Comets as a college student and thought, oh, this is true about humanity. And her whole thing is like, no, it's not true. People can actually be really good at madnessian comments. We've done it for millennia. We've done it in all sorts of different contexts and there are some common things about how people do that. And there's no panacea, there's no one magical solution to commons management. It depends on the situation, it depends on the community. You need to have a lot of local ability in order to manage it well. And so I want to kind of bring that thought to digital space, which is we're not going to crack the top down algorithm that's going to make the Internet good. We've got to think about how do we support kind of an ecosystem of spaces and algorithms that allow us to do the different things that we need to do in sort of complicated human lives.

Do you think humans need part of that to be face to face versus digital?

Yeah, I think face to face is really good and important. I'm not at all digital to the exclusion of face to face, but I actually think they can really reinforce each other. It's like I go to school pickup. Not to linger too long on the school's example, but I go to school pickup and everyone's literally standing there alone looking at their phones. Partly because you don't really know the other parents, partly because you don't have the relationships. So these are things where when I get to know someone, it's much easier to then strike up a conversation offline. But sometimes that's going to happen in a digital place first. And so I don't think that they have to be opposed to each other. I think they can actually support each other. And that's especially true, by the way. I'm going to tend in a physical space to be more comfortable talking to people who seem like me, who seem to share a class or race background. So if we want to seize on the opportunity of building kind of cross group, cross race, cross class spaces, building supports where we all get to know each other a little bit digitally could be a really successful way to do that. If that was what we were building toward, if that was what we were optimizing for,

that makes a lot of sense. So one last sort of line here briefly, if I can been very generous with your time. So you can't obviously predict exactly how all these different spaces are going to develop and we're all going to be surprised. Are there one or two examples of things you would bet surprise us the most pretty soon? Where you say this type of new public is going to enter a place where a lot of people very quickly say, oh, wow, that's something. And that's something not necessarily great for Republican Democratic politics, but great for building community or whatever. Are there things you're most excited about right now?

I do think, like there's, I think, rethinking sort of what does a healthy digital local environment look like? We've gotten to the end of this. I think for a long time we were sort of in this like, well, local newspapers are dying, but maybe we should save them or what are we going to do? I think there's this opportunity to re envision the whole kind of digital ecosystem that a local community needs and start to think about how to do that. I'm starting to see little bits and pieces of that happen all over the place. And this is to me, like, I spend a lot of the time thinking about, like, okay, it's 2050 and we have healthy democratic pluralism around the world. How did it happen? And going back to the start of our conversation, I can't imagine that it happens because we laboriously Keep patching the holes that keep popping in various parts of our current ecosystem. Like not just Facebook, but like our whole system of governance feels like it was never built for multiracial or power sharing. It was never built for the newspaper, let alone the Internet. And now we're trying to like slowly kind of like retrofit it. Like that's never going to happen. But what I think can happen is that there's an efflorescence of experiments that are happening in digital spaces where we crack some things about how to do self governance and how to do pluralism in those spaces and that that then can reach scale much more quickly and then be applied backwards to our bigger sort of our offline governance problems. I know that sounds kind of wacky, but my hope is that we figure out something about Minecraft server governance that every 10 year old in the world learns and just accepts as natural. Like oh, you don't do liquid Minecraft governance. What kind of society is this? And then that's kind of the pathway actually to sort of some offline breakthroughs. So could be wacky. But I'm seeing a lot of those sparks. Right. And I feel like that's a much more exciting place to be than just kind of like fighting the bad stuff.

So the feedback from the digital to the physical world because we can experiment with the digital world and discover new ways is the promise. I hope it does. It does make sense that the challenge is this is a fine non business, nonprofit business model, so to speak.

Yeah.

And the question is just whether it can stand up next to these poisonous for profit business models.

Yeah.

You know, obviously.

Well I, you know, I should say like I think some, there's a regulatory piece of that also like new public isn't focused on it. But I think like, like there's no question that there's some regulation that needs to be put in place as well. And especially as we move into kind of like mass consumer AI world, we need to be thinking really carefully about some of these sort of personalization questions. May look quaint compared to what we're moving into as far as. So my point is only that we need to regulate toward, not just away from so how do we build the kinds of robust ecosystems that we want rather than just try to constrain the existing entities. And I feel like that's what I'm suggesting.

So where do you see the best regulatory thought right now? Is there something that's exciting someplace where that's happening in an exciting way? Because I feel like

I do think it doesn't solve all the problems, but I think pushing toward kind of more interoperability is an interesting move right now because I think it breaks up some of the kind of network monopoly that keeps us locked into. I mean, in other words, right now with Bluesky or with Macedonia, you kind of can choose. Well, do I want centralized advertising run Twitter or do I want not advertising run Twitter? And it's more or less the same service. What you're missing is the ability to pull people over. So I do think that's one place that I think you could write the regulation relatively easily. That would make it much more easy to sit in a more collectively owned place and still participate in or pull out some of the information that you want from these other networks without the distorting lens.

Yeah.

And if the regulation's allowed to exist, I think one of the scariest things in this space is the work that Google funded a decade ago to get the courts to see or declare that these technologies, these algorithms, were First Amendment protected technologies. So the capacity of government to regulate them is only if they can get over the hurdles of the First Amendment, which means you can't regulate them.

Yeah.

And if we boxed ourselves into that, especially now with the new AIs layered on top, then I think we're in serious trouble.

Yeah, I mean, it's a conversation for another time, but I am just trying to get my head around, like, what is it going to be like to really fully be embedded in a chatgpt style browsing system that has some memory about what I like. This is sort of like the filter bubble plus, which is like, here's the level of readability or language I want and here's the kinds of sources I trust. And just remember all of that and then never bother me about again. Feels like tantalizingly close to possible and really disruptive in terms of what it means for all these questions that we talked about. So that's the next set of questions.

That's the next conversation. I'm so grateful for your time, Eli.

Yeah, and I'm grateful.

Thank you so much for your work.

Well, likewise. And thanks for, you know, continuing to drive this conversation forward over the years. Like, I really appreciate that about you.

So I appreciate that.

This has been the 19th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way, produced by Equal Citizens and made physically by hand by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. Find us on the Internets@equalcitizens us. Give us your thoughts, your feedback, share this podcast, share the ideas this podcast is spreading. And, of course, share your wealth if you can with us. What I do, I do pro bono. But not everyone working here can work pro bono. You can help keep us going by donating at Equal Citizens Us. Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode.