#218 — Welcome to the Cult Factory

Several years ago, if you were a teenager and looked at a diet video on YouTube, several of the videos on the right hand side would be thinspo anorexia videos because those things were better at keeping people's attention. If you looked at the 9/11 videos, it would give you Alex Jones Infowars 9/11 conspiracy theories. YouTube recommended Alex Jones conspiracy theories 15 billion times in the right-hand sidebar, which is more than the combined traffic of The New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, The Guardian, etc. combined.

While we've been obsessed with protecting our physical borders as a country, we left the digital border wide open. If Russia or China tried to fly a cruise missile or a bomber plane into the United States, they'd be blasted out of the sky by the Pentagon, but when they try to fly an information bomb into the United States in our virtual infrastructure of Facebook, they're met by a white glove that says 'Exactly which zip code in which African American subdistrict would you like to target?' And that is the core problem. We are completely unprotected when it comes to the virtual infrastructure.

70% of the billion hours a day that people spend on YouTube is actually driven by the recommendation system—by what the recommendation system is choosing for us.

While we've all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths... we missed this much, much earlier point when technology... undermined human weaknesses. You can actually frame the cacophony of grievances and scandals and problems that we've seen in the tech industry from distraction to addiction to polarization to bullying to harassment to the breakdown of truth all in terms of progressively hacking more and more human vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Some of the smartest people on earth... are using the most powerful technology we've ever built not to cure cancer or mitigate climate change or respond to a very real and pressing problem like an emerging pandemic; they're spending their time trying to get better at gaming human attention more effectively to sell random products and even random conspiracy theories.

If you're looking out at the world and wondering why things seems so crazy out there, social media is very likely the reason—or it's the reason that is aggregating so many other reasons. It's the reason why we can't converge on a shared understanding of what's happening so much of the time.

We check our smartphones 100 times or something like that per day. They are intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives ... In any moment of anxiety, we turn to our phone to look at it.

One of the best predictors of whether you will believe in a new conspiracy is whether you already believe in one, and YouTube and Facebook have never made that easier than to sort of open the doorways into a more paranoid style of thinking.