How we need to remake the internet | Jaron Lanier

430,004 views ・ 2018-05-03

TED


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00:12
Back in the 1980s, actually, I gave my first talk at TED,
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and I brought some of the very, very first public demonstrations
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of virtual reality ever to the TED stage.
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And at that time, we knew that we were facing a knife-edge future
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where the technology we needed,
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the technology we loved,
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could also be our undoing.
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We knew that if we thought of our technology
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as a means to ever more power,
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if it was just a power trip, we'd eventually destroy ourselves.
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That's what happens
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when you're on a power trip and nothing else.
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So the idealism
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of digital culture back then
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was all about starting with that recognition of the possible darkness
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and trying to imagine a way to transcend it
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with beauty and creativity.
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I always used to end my early TED Talks with a rather horrifying line, which is,
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"We have a challenge.
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We have to create a culture around technology
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that is so beautiful, so meaningful,
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so deep, so endlessly creative,
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so filled with infinite potential
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that it draws us away from committing mass suicide."
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So we talked about extinction as being one and the same
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as the need to create an alluring, infinitely creative future.
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And I still believe that that alternative of creativity
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as an alternative to death
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is very real and true,
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maybe the most true thing there is.
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In the case of virtual reality --
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well, the way I used to talk about it
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is that it would be something like
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what happened when people discovered language.
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With language came new adventures, new depth, new meaning,
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new ways to connect, new ways to coordinate,
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new ways to imagine, new ways to raise children,
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and I imagined, with virtual reality, we'd have this new thing
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that would be like a conversation
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but also like waking-state intentional dreaming.
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We called it post-symbolic communication,
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because it would be like just directly making the thing you experienced
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instead of indirectly making symbols to refer to things.
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It was a beautiful vision, and it's one I still believe in,
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and yet, haunting that beautiful vision
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was the dark side of how it could also turn out.
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And I suppose I could mention
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from one of the very earliest computer scientists,
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whose name was Norbert Wiener,
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and he wrote a book back in the '50s, from before I was even born,
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called "The Human Use of Human Beings."
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And in the book, he described the potential
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to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people
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and providing feedback to those people in real time
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in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box,
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in a behaviorist system,
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and he has this amazing line where he says,
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one could imagine, as a thought experiment --
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and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote --
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one could imagine a global computer system
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where everybody has devices on them all the time,
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and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did,
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and the whole population
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is subject to a degree of behavior modification.
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And such a society would be insane,
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could not survive, could not face its problems.
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And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment,
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and such a future is technologically infeasible.
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(Laughter)
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And yet, of course, it's what we have created,
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and it's what we must undo if we are to survive.
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So --
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(Applause)
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I believe that we made a very particular mistake,
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and it happened early on,
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and by understanding the mistake we made,
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we can undo it.
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It happened in the '90s,
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and going into the turn of the century,
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and here's what happened.
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Early digital culture,
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and indeed, digital culture to this day,
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had a sense of, I would say, lefty, socialist mission about it,
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that unlike other things that have been done,
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like the invention of books,
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everything on the internet must be purely public,
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must be available for free,
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because if even one person cannot afford it,
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then that would create this terrible inequity.
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Now of course, there's other ways to deal with that.
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If books cost money, you can have public libraries.
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And so forth.
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But we were thinking, no, no, no, this is an exception.
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This must be pure public commons, that's what we want.
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And so that spirit lives on.
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You can experience it in designs like the Wikipedia, for instance,
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many others.
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But at the same time,
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we also believed, with equal fervor,
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in this other thing that was completely incompatible,
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which is we loved our tech entrepreneurs.
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We loved Steve Jobs; we loved this Nietzschean myth
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of the techie who could dent the universe.
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Right?
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And that mythical power still has a hold on us, as well.
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So you have these two different passions,
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for making everything free
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and for the almost supernatural power of the tech entrepreneur.
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How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything's free?
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Well, there was only one solution back then,
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which was the advertising model.
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And so therefore, Google was born free, with ads,
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Facebook was born free, with ads.
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Now in the beginning, it was cute,
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like with the very earliest Google.
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(Laughter)
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The ads really were kind of ads.
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They would be, like, your local dentist or something.
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But there's thing called Moore's law
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that makes the computers more and more efficient and cheaper.
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Their algorithms get better.
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We actually have universities where people study them,
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and they get better and better.
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And the customers and other entities who use these systems
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just got more and more experienced and got cleverer and cleverer.
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And what started out as advertising
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really can't be called advertising anymore.
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It turned into behavior modification,
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just as Norbert Wiener had worried it might.
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And so I can't call these things social networks anymore.
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I call them behavior modification empires.
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(Applause)
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And I refuse to vilify the individuals.
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I have dear friends at these companies,
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sold a company to Google, even though I think it's one of these empires.
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I don't think this is a matter of bad people who've done a bad thing.
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I think this is a matter of a globally tragic,
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astoundingly ridiculous mistake,
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rather than a wave of evil.
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Let me give you just another layer of detail
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into how this particular mistake functions.
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So with behaviorism,
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you give the creature, whether it's a rat or a dog or a person,
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little treats and sometimes little punishments
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as feedback to what they do.
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So if you have an animal in a cage, it might be candy and electric shocks.
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But if you have a smartphone,
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it's not those things, it's symbolic punishment and reward.
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Pavlov, one of the early behaviorists,
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demonstrated the famous principle.
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You could train a dog to salivate just with the bell, just with the symbol.
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So on social networks,
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social punishment and social reward function as the punishment and reward.
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And we all know the feeling of these things.
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You get this little thrill --
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"Somebody liked my stuff and it's being repeated."
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Or the punishment: "Oh my God, they don't like me,
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maybe somebody else is more popular, oh my God."
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So you have those two very common feelings,
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and they're doled out in such a way that you get caught in this loop.
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As has been publicly acknowledged by many of the founders of the system,
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everybody knew this is what was going on.
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But here's the thing:
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traditionally, in the academic study of the methods of behaviorism,
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there have been comparisons of positive and negative stimuli.
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In this setting, a commercial setting,
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there's a new kind of difference
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that has kind of evaded the academic world for a while,
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and that difference is that whether positive stimuli
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are more effective than negative ones in different circumstances,
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the negative ones are cheaper.
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They're the bargain stimuli.
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So what I mean by that is it's much easier
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to lose trust than to build trust.
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It takes a long time to build love.
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It takes a short time to ruin love.
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Now the customers of these behavior modification empires
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are on a very fast loop.
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They're almost like high-frequency traders.
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They're getting feedbacks from their spends
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or whatever their activities are if they're not spending,
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and they see what's working, and then they do more of that.
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And so they're getting the quick feedback,
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which means they're responding more to the negative emotions,
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because those are the ones that rise faster, right?
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And so therefore, even well-intentioned players
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who think all they're doing is advertising toothpaste
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end up advancing the cause of the negative people,
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the negative emotions, the cranks,
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the paranoids,
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the cynics, the nihilists.
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Those are the ones who get amplified by the system.
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And you can't pay one of these companies to make the world suddenly nice
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and improve democracy
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nearly as easily as you can pay to ruin those things.
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And so this is the dilemma we've gotten ourselves into.
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The alternative is to turn back the clock, with great difficulty,
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and remake that decision.
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Remaking it would mean two things.
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It would mean first that many people, those who could afford to,
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would actually pay for these things.
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You'd pay for search, you'd pay for social networking.
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How would you pay? Maybe with a subscription fee,
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maybe with micro-payments as you use them.
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There's a lot of options.
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If some of you are recoiling, and you're thinking,
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"Oh my God, I would never pay for these things.
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How could you ever get anyone to pay?"
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I want to remind you of something that just happened.
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Around this same time
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that companies like Google and Facebook were formulating their free idea,
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a lot of cyber culture also believed that in the future,
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televisions and movies would be created in the same way,
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kind of like the Wikipedia.
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But then, companies like Netflix, Amazon, HBO,
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said, "Actually, you know, subscribe. We'll give you give you great TV."
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And it worked!
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We now are in this period called "peak TV," right?
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So sometimes when you pay for stuff, things get better.
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We can imagine a hypothetical --
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(Applause)
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We can imagine a hypothetical world of "peak social media."
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What would that be like?
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It would mean when you get on, you can get really useful,
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authoritative medical advice instead of cranks.
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It could mean when you want to get factual information,
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there's not a bunch of weird, paranoid conspiracy theories.
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We can imagine this wonderful other possibility.
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Ah.
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I dream of it. I believe it's possible.
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I'm certain it's possible.
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And I'm certain that the companies, the Googles and the Facebooks,
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would actually do better in this world.
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I don't believe we need to punish Silicon Valley.
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We just need to remake the decision.
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Of the big tech companies,
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it's really only two that depend on behavior modification and spying
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as their business plan.
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It's Google and Facebook.
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(Laughter)
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And I love you guys.
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Really, I do. Like, the people are fantastic.
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I want to point out, if I may,
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if you look at Google,
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they can propagate cost centers endlessly with all of these companies,
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but they cannot propagate profit centers.
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They cannot diversify, because they're hooked.
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They're hooked on this model, just like their own users.
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They're in the same trap as their users,
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and you can't run a big corporation that way.
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So this is ultimately totally in the benefit of the shareholders
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and other stakeholders of these companies.
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It's a win-win solution.
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It'll just take some time to figure it out.
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A lot of details to work out,
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totally doable.
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(Laughter)
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I don't believe our species can survive unless we fix this.
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We cannot have a society
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in which, if two people wish to communicate,
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the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person
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who wishes to manipulate them.
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(Applause)
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(Applause ends)
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In the meantime, if the companies won't change,
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delete your accounts, OK?
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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That's enough for now.
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Thank you so much.
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(Applause)
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