littleflute
commented
4 years ago 00:12 I was talking to a guy at a party in California 00:16 about tech platforms 00:17 and the problems they're creating in society. 00:21 And he said, "Man, if the CEOs just did more drugs 00:25 and went to Burning Man, 00:26 we wouldn't be in this mess." 00:28 (Laughter) 00:29 I said, "I'm not sure I agree with you." 00:33 For one thing, most of the CEOs have already been to Burning Man. 00:36 (Laughter) 00:37 But also, I'm just not sure that watching a bunch of half-naked people 00:40 run around and burn things 00:41 is really the inspiration they need right now. 00:44 (Laughter) 00:45 But I do agree that things are a mess. 00:49 And so, we're going to come back to this guy, 00:51 but let's talk about the mess. 00:53 Our climate's getting hotter and hotter. 00:55 It's getting harder and harder to tell truth from fiction. 00:58 And we've got this global migratory crisis. 01:01 And just at the moment when we really need new tools 01:04 and new ways of coming together as a society, 01:07 it feels like social media is kind of tearing at our civic fabric 01:11 and setting us against each other. 01:14 We've got viral misinformation on WhatsApp, 01:17 bullying on Instagram 01:19 and Russian hackers on Facebook. 01:22 And I think this conversation that we're having right now 01:25 about the harms that these platforms are creating 01:28 is so important. 01:30 But I also worry 01:32 that we could be letting a kind of good existential crisis in Silicon Valley 01:37 go to waste 01:38 if the bar for success is just that it's a little harder 01:41 for Macedonian teenagers to publish false news. 01:46 The big question, I think, is not just 01:48 what do we want platforms to stop doing, 01:51 but now that they've effectively taken control of our online public square, 01:56 what do we need from them for the greater good? 01:59 To me, this is one of the most important questions of our time. 02:05 What obligations do tech platforms have to us 02:08 in exchange for the power we let them hold over our discourse? 02:13 I think this question is so important, 02:15 because even if today’s platforms go away, 02:17 we need to answer this question 02:19 in order to be able to ensure that the new platforms that come back 02:22 are any better. 02:24 So for the last year, I've been working with Dr. Talia Stroud 02:27 at the University of Texas, Austin. 02:29 We've talked to sociologists and political scientists 02:32 and philosophers 02:33 to try to answer this question. 02:35 And at first we asked, 02:36 "If you were Twitter or Facebook and trying to rank content for democracy 02:41 rather than for ad clicks or engagement, 02:43 what might that look like?" 02:46 But then we realized, 02:47 this sort of suggests that this is an information problem 02:51 or a content problem. 02:53 And for us, the platform crisis is a people problem. 02:58 It's a problem about the emergent weird things that happen 03:01 when large groups of people get together. 03:04 And so we turned to another, older idea. 03:08 We asked, 03:09 "What happens when we think about platforms as spaces?" 03:13 We know from social psychology that spaces shape behavior. 03:17 You put the same group of people in a room like this, 03:21 and they're going to behave really differently 03:23 than in a room like this. 03:25 When researchers put softer furniture in classrooms, 03:28 participation rates rose by 42 percent. 03:32 And spaces even have political consequences. 03:36 When researchers looked at neighborhoods with parks 03:39 versus neighborhoods without, 03:41 after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, 03:43 they found that neighborhoods with parks had higher levels of social trust 03:47 and were better able to advocate for themselves politically. 03:51 So spaces shape behavior, 03:54 partly by the way they're designed 03:56 and partly by the way that they encode certain norms about how to behave. 04:02 We all know that there are some behaviors that are OK in a bar 04:06 that are not OK in a library, 04:08 and maybe vice versa. 04:10 And this gives us a little bit of a clue, 04:12 because there are online spaces 04:13 that encode these same kinds of behavioral norms. 04:18 So, for example, behavior on LinkedIn 04:21 seems pretty good. 04:23 Why? 04:24 Because it reads as a workplace. 04:26 And so people follow workplace norms. 04:29 You can even see it in the way they dress in their profile pictures. 04:33 (Laughter) 04:34 So if LinkedIn is a workplace, 04:37 what is Twitter like? 04:39 (Laughter) 04:40 Well, it's like a vast, cavernous expanse, 04:43 where there are people talking about sports, 04:45 arguing about politics, yelling at each other, flirting, 04:48 trying to get a job, 04:49 all in the same place, with no walls, no divisions, 04:52 and the owner gets paid more the louder the noise is. 04:55 (Laughter) 04:56 No wonder it's a mess. 04:58 And this raises another thing that become obvious 05:01 when we think about platforms in terms of physical space. 05:04 Good physical spaces are almost always structured. 05:08 They have rules. 05:11 Silicon Valley is built on this idea that unstructured space is conducive 05:17 for human behavior. 05:19 And I actually think there's a reason for this myopia 05:21 built into the location of Silicon Valley itself. 05:26 So, Michele Gelfand is a sociologist 05:29 who studies how norms vary across cultures. 05:31 And she watches how cultures like Japan -- which she calls "tight" -- 05:36 is very conformist, very rule-following, 05:38 and cultures like Brazil are very loose. 05:41 You can see this even in things like 05:43 how closely synchronized the clocks are on a city street. 05:47 So as you can see, the United States is one of the looser countries. 05:51 And the loosest state in the United States is, 05:55 you got it, California. 05:58 And Silicon Valley culture came out of the 1970s Californian counterculture. 06:04 So, just to recap: 06:05 the spaces that the world is living in 06:07 came out of the loosest culture in the loosest state 06:10 in one of the loosest countries in the world. 06:14 No wonder they undervalue structure. 06:17 And I think this really matters, because people need structure. 06:22 You may have heard this word "anomie." 06:24 It literally means "a lack of norms" in French. 06:27 It was coined by Émile Durkheim 06:29 to describe the vast, overwhelming feeling 06:33 that people have in spaces without norms. 06:37 Anomie has political consequences. 06:40 Because what Gelfand has found is that, when things are too loose, 06:45 people crave order and structure. 06:48 And that craving for order and structure correlates really strongly 06:52 with support for people like these guys. 06:55 (Laughter) 06:57 I don't think it's crazy to ask 06:59 if the structurelessness of online life is actually feeding anxiety 07:05 that's increasing a responsiveness to authoritarianism. 07:10 So how might platforms bring people together 07:14 in a way that creates meaning 07:15 and helps people understand each other? 07:18 And this brings me back to our friend from Burning Man. 07:22 Because listening to him, I realized: 07:24 it's not just that Burning Man isn't the solution -- 07:27 it's actually a perfect metaphor for the problem. 07:31 (Laughter) 07:32 You know, it's a great place to visit for a week, 07:34 this amazing art city, rising out of nowhere in the dust. 07:39 But you wouldn't want to live there. 07:41 (Laughter) 07:42 There's no running water, 07:44 there's no trash pickup. 07:45 At some point, the hallucinogens run out, 07:48 and you're stuck with a bunch of wealthy white guys 07:50 in the dust in the desert. 07:52 (Laughter) 07:53 Which, to me, is sometimes how social media feels in 2019. 07:57 (Laughter) 07:59 A great, fun, hallucinatory place to visit has become our home. 08:05 And so, 08:06 if we look at platforms through the lens of spaces, 08:09 we can then ask ourselves: 08:10 Who knows how to structure spaces for the public good? 08:16 And it turns out, this is a question 08:17 people have been thinking about for a long time about cities. 08:21 Cities were the original platforms. 08:24 Two-sided marketplace? 08:25 Check. 08:27 Place to keep up with old friends and distant relatives? 08:30 Check. 08:31 Vector for viral sharing? 08:33 Check. 08:35 In fact, cities have encountered 08:37 a lot of the same social and political challenges 08:40 that platforms are now encountering. 08:43 They've dealt with massive growth that overwhelmed existing communities 08:49 and the rise of new business models. 08:53 They've even had new, frictionless technologies 08:56 that promised to connect everyone together 08:59 and that instead deepened existing social and race divides. 09:05 But because of this history of decay and renewal 09:08 and segregation and integration, 09:10 cities are the source of some of our best ideas 09:13 about how to build functional, thriving communities. 09:18 Faced with a top-down, car-driven vision of city life, 09:22 pioneers like Jane Jacobs said, 09:24 let’s instead put human relationships at the center of urban design. 09:30 Jacobs and her fellow travelers like Holly Whyte, her editor, 09:33 were these really great observers of what actually happened on the street. 09:38 They watched: Where did people stop and talk? 09:42 When did neighbors become friends? 09:44 And they learned a lot. 09:46 For example, they noticed that successful public places 09:51 generally have three different ways that they structure behavior. 09:54 There's the built environment, 09:57 you know, that we're going to put a fountain here or a playground there. 10:01 But then, there's programming, 10:03 like, let's put a band at seven and get the kids out. 10:08 And there's this idea of mayors, 10:11 people who kind of take this informal ownership of a space 10:14 to keep it welcoming and clean. 10:17 All three of these things actually have analogues online. 10:21 But platforms mostly focus on code, 10:23 on what's physically possible in the space. 10:26 And they focus much less on these other two softer, social areas. 10:31 What are people doing there? 10:33 Who's taking responsibility for it? 10:36 So like Jane Jacobs did for cities, 10:39 Talia and I think we need a new design movement 10:42 for online space, 10:43 one that considers 10:45 not just "How do we build products that work for users or consumers?" 10:50 "How do we make something user-friendly?" 10:53 but "How do we make products that are public-friendly?" 10:58 Because we need products that don't serve individuals 11:01 at the expense of the social fabric on which we all depend. 11:06 And we need it urgently, 11:08 because political scientists tell us 11:10 that healthy democracies need healthy public spaces. 11:17 So, the public-friendly digital design movement that Talia and I imagine 11:21 asks this question: 11:22 What would this interaction be like if it was happening in physical space? 11:26 And it asks the reverse question: 11:28 What can we learn from good physical spaces 11:31 about how to structure behavior in the online world? 11:34 For example, I grew up in a small town in Maine, 11:37 and I went to a lot of those town hall meetings that you hear about. 11:41 And unlike the storybook version, they weren't always nice. 11:45 Like, people had big conflicts, big feelings ... 11:48 It was hard sometimes. 11:50 But because of the way that that space was structured, 11:52 we managed to land it OK. 11:55 How? 11:57 Well, here's one important piece. 12:00 The downcast glance, the dirty look, 12:02 the raised eyebrow, the cough ... 12:05 When people went on too long or lost the crowd, 12:09 they didn't get banned or blocked or hauled out by the police, 12:13 they just got this soft, negative social feedback. 12:16 And that was actually very powerful. 12:20 I think Facebook and Twitter could build this, 12:22 something like this. 12:27 (Laughter) 12:31 I think there are some other things that online spaces can learn 12:34 from offline spaces. 12:36 Holly Whyte observed that in healthy public spaces, 12:39 there are often many different places that afford different ways of relating. 12:43 So the picnic table where you have lunch with your family 12:48 may not be suited for the romantic walk with a partner 12:52 or the talk with some business colleagues. 12:55 And it's worth noting that in real space, 12:57 in none of these places are there big, visible public signs of engagement. 13:02 So digital designers could think about 13:05 what kind of conversations do we actually want to invite, 13:08 and how do we build specifically for those kinds of conversations. 13:13 Remember the park that we talked about that built social trust? 13:16 That didn't happen because people were having these big political arguments. 13:20 Most strangers don't actually even talk to each other 13:23 the first three or four or five times they see each other. 13:27 But when people, even very different people, 13:29 see each other a lot, 13:31 they develop familiarity, 13:32 and that creates the bedrock for relationships. 13:35 And I think, actually, you know, 13:39 maybe that early idea of cyberspace as kind of this bodiless meeting place 13:44 of pure minds and pure ideas 13:46 sent us off in the wrong direction. 13:48 Maybe what we need instead is to find a way to be in proximity, 13:52 mostly talking amongst ourselves, 13:54 but all sharing the same warm sun. 13:58 And finally: 13:59 healthy public spaces create a sense of ownership and equity. 14:04 And this is where the city metaphor becomes challenging. 14:07 Because, if Twitter is a city, 14:09 it's a city that's owned by just a few people 14:12 and optimized for financial return. 14:16 I think we really need digital environments 14:19 that we all actually have some real ownership of, 14:21 environments that respect the diversity of human existence 14:25 and that give us some say and some input into the process. 14:28 And I think we need this urgently. 14:30 Because Facebook right now -- 14:32 I sort of think of, like, 1970s New York. 14:35 (Laughter) 14:36 The public spaces are decaying, there's trash in the streets, 14:40 people are kind of, like, mentally and emotionally 14:42 warming themselves over burning garbage. 14:44 (Laughter) 14:46 And -- 14:48 (Applause) 14:53 And the natural response to this is to hole up in your apartment 14:56 or consider fleeing for the suburbs. 15:00 It doesn't surprise me 15:01 that people are giving up on the idea of online public spaces 15:05 the way that they've given up on cities over their history. 15:10 And sometimes -- I'll be honest -- 15:12 it feels to me like this whole project of, like, wiring up a civilization 15:16 and getting billions of people to come into contact with each other 15:19 is just impossible. 15:22 But modern cities tell us that it is possible 15:25 for millions of people who are really different, 15:27 sometimes living right on top of each other, 15:30 not just to not kill each other, 15:32 but to actually build things together, 15:34 find new experiences, 15:36 create beautiful, important infrastructure. 15:41 And we cannot give up on that promise. 15:45 If we want to solve the big, important problems in front of us, 15:50 we need better online public spaces. 15:53 We need digital urban planners, 15:56 new Jane Jacobses, 15:57 who are going to build the parks and park benches of the online world. 16:01 And we need digital, public-friendly architects, 16:05 who are going to build what Eric Klinenberg calls 16:07 "palaces for the people" -- libraries and museums and town halls. 16:12 And we need a transnational movement, 16:14 where these spaces can learn from each other, 16:17 just like cities have, 16:18 about everything from urban farming to public art to rapid transit. 16:25 Humanity moves forward 16:28 when we find new ways to rely on and understand and trust each other. 16:34 And we need this now more than ever. 16:38 If online digital spaces are going to be our new home, 16:42 let's make them a comfortable, beautiful place to live, 16:45 a place we all feel not just included 16:48 but actually some ownership of. 16:50 A place we get to know each other. 16:53 A place you'd actually want not just to visit 16:56 but to bring your kids. 16:59 Thank you. 17:00 (Applause)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWA1gvA5lxU