we are being programmed
We were talking backstage about the importance of algorithms. So it's not just that these algorithms can effectively control what we think. They can show us some things.
They can show us not other things. They can show us the order. They tend to kind of concentrate toward outrage and negativity.
And with Nostor, for example, you could have different clients with different algorithms or no algorithm, just rank order. Do you want to talk a little bit about kind of the importance of open sourcing algorithms or choice of algorithms? Yeah. This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now.
I think the real debate should be about free will. And we feel it right now because we are being programmed.
We're being programmed based on what we say we're interested in.
And we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting.
And as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.
But the algorithm, even if it's open source, is effectively a black box.
You cannot predict 100% of the time how it's going to work, what it's going to show you. And it can be moved and changed at any time.
And because people become so dependent upon it, it's actually changing and impacting the agency we have, the free agency we have.
And I think the only answer to this is not to work harder at open sourcing algorithms or making them more explainable about what they're doing and why they're doing it, but to give people choice.
Give people choice of what algorithm they want to use from a party that they trust.
Give people choice to build their own algorithm that they can plug in on top of these networks and see what they want and they can shift them out as well.
and give people choice to have really a marketplace around an algorithm that you can choose. I want to use this for these reasons.
I don't trust that party anymore, so I'm not going to use this, or I'm not going to use anything at all.
I want to be the discovery mechanism. That's really the biggest problem and why these corporations became so large and so valuable is because they solved the discovery problem on the Internet. We talk a lot about the public square, but the public square cannot be owned by one company.
The public square, by default, is the Internet. But the problem with the public square is it's very hard to discover and to be matched with the things that you're truly interested in. And that's where the value of a Google came in.
It helps you discover. That's where the value of a Facebook. It helps you discover your friends.
The value of a Twitter helps you discover news and interesting content of the day. But if we can solve the discovery problem in an open source way, in a free agency way, that you get to choose how you see the world and what algorithms you're using and you know more or less how they're working and that you can turn them off and see everything. That's really powerful and that's what we need.
And we just haven't seen a lot of motion there. Twitter took the first step some time ago when we enabled you to turn off the algorithm and just see who you're following. But the problem with that is you miss tons and tons of content because there's just millions and billions of tweets going by.
And you need some help, but to be able to trust the help, I think you need to be able to choose it and have agency over that. Otherwise, it really is attacking free will. It's programming how we think, and we can resist it all we want.
But it knows us better than we know us because we tell it our preferences implicitly and explicitly all the time. And it just feels super dangerous to continue to rely upon that without choice.