WEBVTT
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[muffled crowd murmuring]
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Stay safe.
- When are we going down?
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I was intellectually prepared
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for something like this to happen-
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[muffled crowd murmuring]
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And yet it was shocking to see.
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[thudding]
[group shouting]
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Anytime something like this happens,
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the response you tend to get
from your standard politician
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is this is a shocking aberration.
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This is not who we are.
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The scenes of chaos at the Capitol
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do not reflect a true America,
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do not represent who we are.
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The problem with that
is that, of course,
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the events of today represent
an America that we know of.
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It's happening right now in America.
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It makes us pretend that
history can only progress
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in one direction, that we
just sort of have to wait
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for the tough things to pass,
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and our glorious future
will be there to greet us,
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which blinds us to the fact
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that we have really put ourselves
in a terrible predicament
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in large part because of social media.
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[group cheering]
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All the big social networks
are fundamentally built
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around inciting emotional engagement,
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and that can be fear, rage,
[woman spitting]
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lust, xenophobia.
[muffled shouting]
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It could also be humor and nostalgia
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and those kind of nice things,
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but it's just easier to make people scared
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than it is to make them
feel warm and fuzzy.
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These are the only things that
the algorithms can measure.
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They don't know how to measure
for truth or civic virtue
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or the inherent quality of an
image or something like that,
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so they very quickly
become this competition
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to tap into people's basest emotions.
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Fake news, no more!
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What you'll see in the wake of this
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is what you see in the wake
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of every high-profile
disturbance or tragedy,
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which is you'll see all
the platforms making a few
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very visible decisions to
ban this or that person
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or this or that account,
and that may be good.
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That may be better than nothing,
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but they're not changing
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their fundamental underlying structures.
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They're not changing their incentive,
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they're not changing their business model,
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so it's just window dressing.
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[crowd shouting]
[coughing]
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When you hear someone like Joe Biden
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trying to call us to our better instincts,
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trying to paint a more optimistic
picture of human nature,
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I think that there's a lot
about that that is defensible.
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I don't think that the
only way to respond to that
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is to say, "No, you're naive.
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You're whitewashing history.
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Of course, this is who we are."
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I think either form of that essentialism
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and determinism, in a way,
is kind of missing the point
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or is at least far too reductive.
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It's actually convenient
for people like politicians
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and social media companies to bandy about
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kind of half-baked notions of human nature
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so that they can use those
notions of human nature
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to support whatever
they were inclined to do
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in the first place.
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You can say, "Well, I won an election,
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so I have a national mandate,
so that's who we are,"
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or "I run a social media platform,
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so I want us to be able
to express ourselves
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because that's who we are."
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[snare drum music]
[crowd shouting]
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It's much harder for someone who's running
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a social media platform to talk
about improving the material
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and structural and
psychological conditions
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in the lives of their users
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and how you can make it less
likely that those conditions
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will lead people to fear
and destruction and violence
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and xenophobia and all the rest of it.
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That's a much tougher,
multi-layered problem.
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It's much easier to say,
"Well, I believe in people
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and I'm optimistic that they're
better than this," right,
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because that lets you off the hook.
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The long arc of history
doesn't just bend itself.
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We have to do the work of bending it.
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