Ep. 371: Is It Finally Time to Leave Social Media?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 371: Is It Finally Time to Leave Social Media? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3e96b615-5feb-4b47-a720-a191b990380f ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Curated Conversation Platforms Are Fundamentally Harmful** - Curated conversation platforms (Twitter/Threads) combine large social conversations with algorithmic curation and create systemic harms. - These harms are fundamental to the technology, not accidental implementation bugs. Transcript: Cal Newport Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I sent a short essay to my newsletter. I wrote it in about 15 minutes, but it was about as raw or as pointed as I ever get. The essay started like this. Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, Twitter is not real life. But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter or Blue Sky or TikTok do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the Left or the right, the results are often horrific. This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms. They are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible as much as any other force for the unraveling of civil society that seems to be accelerating. All right, then later in the essay, I reached the following conclusion. After troubling national events, there's often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Well, here's one option to consider. Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news or spread ideas or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things, someone who serves real people in the real world. In the over two decades or so that I've been writing that newsletter, I don't think I've ever received as large or as positive of a response as I did for that post. I'm at something like 200 email replies and counting and nearly 100 comments. The vast majority of this feedback is saying the same thing. Thank you. This was the final push I needed to finally quit these apps. Now, that's got me thinking. Our biggest problem with social media right now is not convincing people that it's bad. People know this. People don't love these platforms. They don't defend them the way they used to, but they're stuck in a sort of purgatory where they know it's bad, but they're not sure exactly why or whether it's something that maybe could Be fixed or maybe something that's worse for other people than it is for them. So they stay where they are. They stay in the status quo waiting for someone to push them into a different pattern. Well, today I want to provide that push. I'm going to put on my technocritic professor hat and provide a precise and detailed explanation of how exactly the worst of these platforms impact us and why these problems are fundamental To these technologies and not something that we can easily fix. I want to give you the ironclad case for why the most reasonable response for most people is to do what I recommend in my essay. To quit. For good. ([Time 0:00:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b0880323-551a-4472-a95f-861c9224e6d5)) - **The Three Connected Harms** - Three connected harms are distraction, demoderation, and disassociation which form a downward slope. - Sliding from distraction to disassociation links everyday overuse to violent, nihilistic outcomes. Transcript: Cal Newport So what are the harms? If you ask people, hey, what's wrong with like Twitter, blue sky or threads? Like what are the harms that we care about? They'll eventually probably list some combination of the following three things. I'll put these up on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. They're probably going to say, okay, distraction. That's a common harm. This is the one I talk about a lot in my books on this show. It's the idea that there's an addictive element to these platforms so that we use them more than is healthy and to the detriment of other things that we seem to be are important in our life. Another harm people will often mention if you talk about these platforms is demoderation. This is where you begin to lose any sense of moderation around a given issue. It's where you become increasingly strident, see less room for good faith or even basic humanity on the other side of the issue in question. There's a lot of tribalism when it comes to demoderation. You become part of a tribe that's fighting some sort of epic fight. So because of these stakes, there's a lot of sort of furious policing of your own tribe. The third harm we often hear about these things is what I call disassociation. This is where things really get scary. This is where you begin to make a complete break from normal associations with human community. You lose connection to normative ethical constraints. This is the state in which violence to others or to yourself becomes a possibility or where you become numbed to seeing such violence being perpetrated against others. ([Time 0:04:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94f54147-f0a4-48a4-9c1f-12f4eed5a915)) - **Algorithms Train Your Motivation Circuits** - Algorithmic curation optimizes engagement by learning what triggers your short-term motivation circuits. - This constant dopamine-driven reinforcement makes resisting frequent use extremely difficult. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, I'm going to do some drawing here. So beware, if you're listening, you might want to turn on the YouTube version to see my brilliant art. All right, so what I have up here on the screen is the three harms we talked about. Distraction, demoderation, and disassociation. The right way to think about how we interact with these is to imagine that there is a slope. So I'm going to start drawing a slope. I'm going to start, I got to get my R's hat on. Starting with distraction, we start sloping downhill. And then we'll switch over to demoderation. That slope continues. Then finally, we get to disassociation. That slope continues. And I'm going to draw here a sort of dividing line between, you know, this here, mainstream. Oh, look at that handwriting, Jesse. Mainstream internet on top, dark web below. All right, so let me explain this beautiful picture I just drew. It's pretty colorful, actually. I give myself a lot of credit for that. It's a slope sloping downhill. It starts in the distraction zone, then slope goes through the demoderation zone, and then finally the slope goes through the disassociation zone. I've drawn a ground across this slope diagram. So right around the place we go from demoderation to disassociation, the slope goes underground. Above ground is like mainstream internet. Below ground, now we're in the world sort of of the dark web. So let me explain my model here. When you first start using these type of curated conversation platforms, it's pretty easy to fall onto the slope that is into the zone of distraction. So you sort of fall into the top of the slope where you're like, you know what, I'm using this probably too much. I'm using this a lot. Whatever my platform poison of choice is, I'm kind of on this more that it's healthy, right? Like, oh, this is not good. You know me, I'm addicted to my phone. So we're kind of in that territory. Here's the thing though. You start sliding and you're in this distraction zone long enough. Gravity is going to pull you down into the demoderation portion of the slope. And now you're not just using these services too much. You're demoderating. You're losing your ability to see the other side, any sort of good faith. You find yourself in dehumanizing tendencies. I just hate those people. I can't anyone who supports this person. I just can't even imagine that, right? Like they are wrong. And wait a second, wait a second. You're on my team. You said the wrong thing there. Well, don't you realize we're at war here. We have to close ranks. All that begins to happen, and it gets worse and worse as you slide down the slope. If you continue down the slope and the pressure is pulling here, you'll end up in the disassociation zone where you say, you know what? Screw it, right? The world is unredeemable. Once you're down here is where people bounce off of the primary mainstream platforms you begin to bounce off those into like whatever mixture of things like gab or kick or rumble like Now you kind of like end up roaming around these barely regulated sort of wild west semi-dark web type services. And that's where like the really bad stuff happens. This is, I call this the slope of terribleness. This is actually the right way to understand these harms. They're all connected. You start with one, but gravity is pulling you down towards the next and then towards the next. Now your question might be, can we fix this? Maybe if we just fix these services, a way that we can maybe put up some roadblocks on the slope of terribleness and prevent this from happening. But I want to argue that actually this is not the side effect of some mistakes in the way these services were implemented that can be fixed. But actually this slope of terribleness and the tendency to slide down it is actually fundamental to how these technologies function. Let me get a little bit into this. All right, let's start with distraction. You start using a curated conversation platform. Part of the problem is the curation means that the algorithm is looking for engaging material. What actually catches your attention? Whatever that is, it will get pretty good at finding that it represents it as sort of weighted data points in a multidimensional space, But it figures out what type of content is engaging For you because that's how they make their money. Now, the issue with this is the stuff you're seeing on the phone is very compelling. This will pretty soon begin to overwhelm your short-term motivation centers in your brain. So we have these circuits in our brain that are making predictions. They're looking at activities that are available to you in the moment, and they're making predictions based off past learning. What are the different outcomes going to be of these various short-term activities? And if the brain has learned, oh, there's a really positive outcome that's going to happen from a particular activity, you get a flood of dopamine in that motivation circuit, which Activates it and then makes that activity seem irresistible, right? This is something we often get wrong about dopamine. I noticed this in like the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox's comments in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination. A lot of people think of dopamine as a pleasure chemical of like, oh, once you do something, you get a splash of dopamine and it feels good. No, no, no. It's a motivation chemical. So these short-term motivation circuits have learned through past experience. For example, when I eat that cookie, there's all of these things I feel that are good and the circuits learn from that. And they say, great. When I see a cookie again, dopamine will activate that circuit because that circuit recognizes the cookie and give me a sense of intense motivation to eat it. Well, algorithmically curated content really plays to those circuits very well. And if you're using the phone all the time, you build a very strong prediction circuit that when it says a phone is nearby, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine in that circuit saying, pick Up that phone and look at it, we're going to see something that's going to cause a reaction that's interesting, be it pleasurable or outrage, but it's going to be interesting, an interesting Reaction. That is very, very strong. And the problem is the phone is always with you. So that circuit is just constantly being bathed in dopamine. It becomes very, very hard. You can resist it sometimes, but it becomes very hard to consistently resist it. So you go back to using those services again and again and again. That's just a basic sort of feedback reinforcement loop. ([Time 0:09:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ace2dc46-7870-446a-b7a4-5b48c3526afd)) - **Echo Chambers Plus Tribal Cues Drive Polarization** - Algorithms create unavoidable echo chambers by surfacing content that maximizes engagement. - Coupled with conversational social cues, this activates tribal instincts and drives demoderation. Transcript: Cal Newport Why does this bring us into demoderation well two things happen with these platforms once you start using them all the time another side effect of the algorithmic curation is the echo Chamber effect and we say this sort of loosely like oh don't be in an echo chamber but i'm saying it in a in a sort of a techno determinist sort of way it is a unavoidable side effect of an algorithmically Curated information experience. The way these algorithms actually work, and I don't want to be too technical, but basically they have these huge multidimensional points. So just large vectors of numbers that's described as an embedding of content into, think of it as like a bunch of little descriptions. I have a thousand categories I can use when i'm trying to describe something and i take a thing and i go through and give it a number in each of these categories and that combination like Describes it really well and what it does is it learns spaces the multi-dimensional spaces in which these preference vectors exist it sort of learns these regions where content here Does really well with this person. That creates an echo chamber. I mean, it's not, no one's sitting there programming, create echo chamber, execute, or there's an echo chamber knob. It is just an unavoidable consequence of using this type of, I'm going to observe your engagement and then use that to try to figure out where in the space of possible content things create The most engagement. So you're going to start seeing a lot of stuff that's similar. So if there's something you lean towards on an issue, you're going to be seeing a lot more of stuff about that side of the issue. And you're going to see stuff that's more and more engaging within that space, which typically would be the stuff that's a little bit more strident. We like that. Okay. The other issue is, so we're hearing kind of the same stuff, algorithmic echo chamber. These are conversation platforms. Remember I mentioned that's important that it's people conversing, not just like you consuming content from experts. That is going to fire up in your mind the tribal community circuits. Yeah, these are these people that we're talking back and forth. I'm in community. The social circuits come up. So you have echo chambers plus tribal community circuits fired up. And these things come together and they create in your mind this virtual tribe that has a very strong cause. That's where demoderation comes from. ([Time 0:16:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42c74c8d-9e52-4084-a62d-11f9346655b6)) - **Resisting The Slope Costs Mental Energy** - Sliding down the slope lowers human flourishing and requires constant willpower to arrest. - Staying on platforms often consumes mental energy that could be spent on more valuable pursuits. Transcript: Cal Newport The more increasingly demoderated you get, and look in the mirror, you know you are. Like whatever issue it is you care about. These tribes are almost, by the way, random what you end up echo chambered in. Like your slight preferences plus whatever the algorithm pushed you in like it could be pretty arbitrary but just think about right now whether it's like it's political and you're You're like on the left and thinking about MAGA people or you're on the right and you're thinking about like the blue hair people or you know you're a like a super health mom who's thinking About, man, these pharmaceutical companies are poisoning my kids because they don't care or whatever the issue is, right? Think about the push to dehumanize that other group. Like, man, they're just terrible. Look at the stuff I'm reading. I just cannot imagine how they exist. When you are in that mindset, you keep sliding down the slope of terribleness. That is what eventually gets you to disassociation because you get to a point where you say, the other thing, the side I don't like is so terrible and yet nothing is happening about it. We're not, you know, cutting off half the country or whatever it is. Like they're not seeing that I'm just right and changing their views to align with mine and no one seems to care or whatever the issue is. And it nihilism, either nihilism or rage follows. Like I just, I can't fathom this and it sort of breaks it to make matters worse, especially if you're younger. A side effect of a conversation platform is that it's taking the place of actual human interaction. So you're also going to become more actually socially isolated so huge demoderation plus more of social isolation whether you're young this also happens a lot with older people as Well who are sort of retired and older in life man that gets you to disassociation before you know it you're showing up at comma p comet pizza uh you Someone's got to free the kids from the Secret caves underneath. Or you're a nihilistic shooter. One thing leads to another. And it is built into the technology. So we can't fix this. You can't. This is not. There's no version of Twitter that doesn't have this. Because the point is. Is the two things that drive this. Is the fact that it's people coming together. It's virtual interaction that is algorithmically curated. You turn it off. You don't have those services. You can't have a version of those services without conversation and algorithmic curation. That is the service. That's like saying to Pizza Hut, look, we don't want to put you out of business, but is there a way you can exist without selling pizza? Like that's what we do, right? This is what these conversational algorithmic platforms do. You have a huge number of people come together onto a platform to have conversation. You have to have algorithmic curation because what else are you going to do? You have 500 million people submitting tweets a day. You have to curate it. And if you're going to curate it, you're going to curate it on like what people want to see. And you put those forces together, you slide down the slope of terribleness. So there is no technological fix to this. It is a unavoidable side effect of these technologies. All right. So you're probably saying yes, but I'm not going to end up at the bottom of this slope. I've used these things. Most people don't. A lot of people use these services, but they don't end up on, you know, Rumble or Groyper Discord servers, right? And it's true. You can resist the pull of gravity. But let's think about what that costs. I'm going to bring up this picture one more time on here. So we have the slope of terribleness here. So, yes, I'm going to draw a little picture here. It is true. You can, you know, at some point, hold on. I don't know. Does that look like a mountain climber holding on, Jesse? Yeah. I'm doing something. All right. So you can arrest your fall at some point. But here's the issue. There's two issues with this, right? Number one, imagine over here we have a scale. Think about this as like a scale of flourishing, right? The higher up you're on the scale, the more you're flourishing as a human. I'll label that flourishing. I'll pull that down there. So here's the problem. Yes, you stop yourself somewhere on the slope of terribleness, but the farther you've gone down, the lower you've gone down on the scale of flourishing. So maybe you arrest your stop somewhere here in the demoderation area, but you've arrested your life in a place that's worse. You're flourishing less than if you weren't on the slope at all. To make matters worse, resisting further slide down this slope requires a lot of mental energy. To not be demoderated when you're using the services all the time requires like a real application of will. When you're demoderated, the not to make that final slide towards disassociation requires a lot of will. To be fully disassociated and resist the call to come join other disassociated people who understand your disaffection on these sort of dark web type services, that takes a lot of mental Energy. ([Time 0:20:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6667e6af-84e6-4bb6-b86e-f212ee807e4d)) - **Use Direct Media And Real-World Groups** - Replace news and ideas on platforms with subscriptions to trusted media, newsletters, and podcasts. - Join real-world groups and projects instead of performing participation on social feeds. Transcript: Cal Newport You want to stay up to date on the news? Subscribe to actual media. You want to hear information that you think is otherwise being suppressed? All right. Subscribe to newsletter. Subscribe to podcast. Do the old-fashioned work of here is a real individual. Here is why I think they are a good person to listen to. Here is their credentials. Here's how they convinced me, and I will listen to them writing out a thing once a week, and there's no curation, and it's not conversation. Great. Do that. The internet can help you here. You don't have to be on the curated conversation platforms. You want to be a part of something. That's great. Being on those platforms just tricks you into thinking you're a part of something. You're not. You imagine often if you're engaged in combat on these platforms, you imagine you're at the front of the crowd marching on that bridge from Selma. In reality, you're in an attention factory. Punch you in with your time clock while your billionaire overseers laugh as their net worth goes up due to your efforts. You want to be a part of something, actually go be a part of something, not on a screen. And maybe you're using it because you're bored. Find better entertainment. Even on your phone, there's better high quality entertainment. Do whatever. It literally almost anything else. I know it presses these buttons. Find other things to press the buttons. You can listen to podcasts, read newsletters, read books, watch movies. You have streaming media. You have literally something like a half a trillion dollars worth of CapEx expense and entertainment available at your fingertips for like $30 a month. Like there's plenty of other things you can do to not be bored. That doesn't put you on the slope of terribleness. ([Time 0:26:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33d0577d-886b-463f-a0e3-feda40024cb4)) - **Keep Smartphones Off Middle Schoolers** - Prevent kids from accessing curated conversation platforms until they're older by using strict phone rules. - Blocking mainstream platforms early keeps them off the slope that leads to fringe, dangerous sites. Transcript: Cal Newport One, I don't know your model for phone moderation with your kids. It's not actually the, the that I would typically recommend. So just to cover what I would typically recommend would be no phone in middle school, no smartphone. You can have a dumb phone. Logistics, sure. Not yours, but you can take it if you need to take the bus or something and you need it in case of emergencies. But the model I would normally push is no smartphone until high school. That smartphone is going to be really locked down until 16. And then we'll take a lot of that off. And that's when you can begin. You've gone through puberty. You've established your social identity. You've established your social circles. You're just older. And now we're going to start giving you sort of more free reign. All right. So during that period where you have a smartphone, but it's highly restricted, how do you find these sort of sites that are at the bottom of the slope of terribleness? If you understand the slope of terribleness, I think it changes the way you think about this because no one starts at those sites at the bottom, right? No one is like, oh, I don't, I got a smartphone. I can't wait to get on Gab. I can't wait to go to some weird discord server where like Nick Fuentes is going to be talking about Groyper movement, something like that. You get there by sliding down the slope of terribleness. You start with distraction. It's, you know, you're the 12-year who's talking about, you know, all these memes you know about. You're kind of like clued into sort of fun internet culture. And then that drags you into demoderation. You get into these influence communities. And now you begin to get really caught up in some particular issue or not. And because you're young, you're like, yeah, man, I social groups is everything. I need my group. I need to fit in. I found my group. This is firing up all of my developing like sort of like early puberty brain networks. This is my group. And then you get disassociated eventually because you're like, I'm so worked up now that like I now, you know, I'm isolated because I'm on here all the time and i'm so worked up about this I feel like disassociating and that's when you hear someone in one of the mainstream communities say hey hey hey hey the real conversation about this is over here like they're they're The man when you can fill in so many other things for what that means they're going to censor us but this is where the real conversation is and then that's when you make your way over to the Really dark places. So if you are blocking the mainstream curated conversation platforms for your 14 year old, they're not going to enter the slope. So you don't have to worry as much about these sort of weird, those are weird, weird places. ([Time 0:40:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d2cf4199-4b6a-4179-90e3-c87bad497fbf)) - **Make YouTube Intentionally, Avoid Capture** - Making YouTube content can be valid but avoid algorithmic capture by prioritizing work you believe in. - Treat video creation as a serious, time-consuming craft and schedule deep blocks to produce it well. Transcript: Cal Newport I have several different jobs, but the one I'm struggling with big time is my job of making YouTube videos. Two questions. Should I be doing this at all? I'm thinking about your disqualifications and so good they can't ignore you. And if it is okay, how to organize the deep work required to come up with an idea and script, filming it, and then editing and publishing it? All right. So, yeah, YouTube – because, again, we said YouTube is in this sort of interesting liminal space, right? So question number one, should you be making YouTube videos at all? As all of my YouTube watchers know, I think it's a terrible thing to do. I guess it depends on – I guess it depends on the channel. Maybe if your channel was about you have a football field with one of those long-term measuring things that you use with the roller so you can knock off yardage to see how far someone throws A ball. And what you were doing was you were punting puppies from the end zone and seeing who could punt the puppy farther. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be doing that YouTube thing. But if you're doing something useful on YouTube, like a deep dive on Harry Potter's Nocturne Alley, I have a lot of questions, then maybe it's okay. So here's how I would think about YouTube. Video alone is not bad. I think video, independent media in video versus audio. I think independent media itself is something that is valuable. And there's three main forms of independent media. There's writing. We'll see this in things like blogs or newsletters. There's audio, which you see primarily in podcast. And there's video. Now, YouTube is the easiest platform to use to sort of make your video seen. And I don't think it by itself is a problem. But what you need to be aware of, if you're creating an independent video on YouTube, you have to be very wary of capture. So there is an algorithm lurking on YouTube. It's lurking in the recommendations. And you see this as a creator in those view numbers and those subscriber numbers. And it really, the thing you have to be so careful about is capture, which says, I am going to just explore the slope of how do I make those numbers higher and higher and higher? And then you, you end up in algorithm land. Now, again, I, I, YouTube tends not to be as dangerous for people as these other, these other platforms. It can be, but it tends not to be. But that can put you into, now you're chasing the algorithm. It puts you in the sort of weird sort of engagement farming type of land and you don't, like what you're creating, you don't even feel that strongly about. And it could be sort of hollowed out. I mean, this is what like Mr. Beast did, is he just straight up followed what makes more people watch and then he kept ratcheting that up and ratcheting that up and where he ended up as the highest subscribed youtube Channel on youtube is these like multi-million dollar videos where every seven seconds is aimed at like there's no block of more than seven seconds where there's not something compelling Being promised to you or that promise being delivered on like do do do do do do visually amazing stakes are high right so like you know i don't know it's not terrible but it's kind of weird Where you end up if you follow the algorithm or you end up like a lot of people like in political waters like okay i'm going to get more stride in on this issue because more people view it You know i, I'm going from I'm Mr. Health Advice to like, if you look at a vaccine, your child's hair is going to fall out. Because you get more and more attention for it. So you got to be careful about capture. But if you're producing something you're proud of and you want it to do well, but you're not willing to completely follow the algorithm, then, you know, I think it's okay. In terms of how you actually schedule doing YouTube creation, Jesse will attest to, I mean, it's just time consuming, right? Don't underestimate the principle that's at play here is the principle from slow productivity of work at a natural pace. It takes a long time to do this. Don't pretend like it doesn't. Just because a YouTube video is quick to watch, don't delude yourself. Like, yeah, I'm going to put aside an hour before work and then after work on Friday, and that's how I'm going to run my YouTube channel. You have to think of it like I'm building a chair. It'd take a lot of time. I got this wood. I got to plane it and shape it and glue this. Wait for that to glue. I'll clamp this. There's a lot of skills involved to come back to it. It's going to require a lot of time for me to do. So, so that's the other thing to keep in mind to do this. Well, requires a lot of time. It's not, you know, you're not going to just stumble onto a camera and everyone rushes to watch you. It is brutal. I mean, you'll attest to that, Jesse. It's like impossible to get people to watch things. It's, you know, and you really, you really got to do a good job. So no, I'm not mad at you for making YouTube videos. Don't get algorithmically captured and be realistic about how hard it is. ([Time 0:43:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13704f80-56ff-49da-8d39-bff92c3de204)) - **How Social Media Hijacked Web 2.0** - The social-media era hijacked Web 2.0 by replacing distributed publishing with attention-driven, algorithmic gardens. - The algorithmic turn (circa 2012–2015) made constant engagement profitable and created the slope of terribleness. Transcript: Cal Newport It's fundamental. How do we share information on the internet? Don't we need to focus instead on how to use it better? Yeah, I get this question a lot when I give talks about social media, especially to young people or parents of young people is the like, come on, what we need is to learn how to like use whatever It is, you know, responsibly. I don't buy it here. And here's what I think the fundamental mix-up is. The social media companies completely hijacked the Web 2.0 revolution. So the Web 2.0, for those who don't follow internet trajectories, Web 2.0 was about the worldwide web making it easier for information to both be published and consumed, right? But mainly making it easier to publish information. So instead of having to go and manually edit a website or to have a sort of complicated database driven, like I'm going to pull out the Amazon listing and put on the screen, but basically It was like, it was hard if you weren't had a serious website or a serious web developer, it was hard to update or put information on the web. And the web 2.0 was like a collection of different advancements. Typically it was a lot of stuff that was actually advancements in the JavaScript language that ran in the new version of HTML that made it easier for like things like I can type something Into a form and it shows up and everyone can see it. So blogs were like one of the first early web 2.0 things where it's like yeah you can publish information on the web without having to code without having to hire like a web developer right So we got things like blogs and like these kind of early social network type things like friendsters where like different people could post things we had places where you could build Websites uh online using an online interface without code and so that that was the web 2 revolution was basically the web 1.0 said here is a place to post information that anyone can consume It it's a common protocol all you need is a browser and anything that's been posted you can you can you can uh you can consume web 2 is like now anyone can produce stuff to be consumed as well Great revolution super important uh one of the more important revolutions the last hundred years then the social media companies came along and said oh people publishing information Is interesting because that could be a lot of information if you have a lot of people publishing stuff, you can create amounts of information that you would never be able to hire people To come anywhere near there. If you want to hire people to create content like newspaper writers or whatever, it's expensive and it's like pretty limited how much stuff you've produced. And this was, these models were going on. You had like Nick Denton and Gawker and people saying like, Hey, can we hire like 20 people and have them write 10 blog articles a day? And then we can try to monetize it. But the social media companies say that's amateur hour. You're hiring like 10 people at Gawker to publish 20 things a day. And you have 200 things published a day that you're selling ads on. Why don't we get 200,000 people for free to write information for us? Like this is the real secret of Web2. So they took over Web2 by building these beautiful websites, right? Facebook's triumph early on was in part because they, Mark and the original programmers he worked with, really understood these cutting-edge new Web2 type of capabilities. They understood the new technology things like ajax which was allowed for you know asynchrony and javascript so you could have a static website and pull information to put without Having to reload the whole web page they were on top of that technology early facebook websites was like beautiful web two products that was like very very easy for you to publish stuff For people to see they over web to forget blogs forget like interactive creative websites just come to our gardens our social media gardens and it's easy there to publish your own material Then they figured out another thing which was people get bored publishing their own material because what happens is, and anyone who had a blog in like 2005 knows this, well, what happened Is you would publish stuff and no one cared. It was the equivalent of like putting stuff on the bulletin board at the coffee shop. No one's going to read your essay. So people would get bored. Yeah, I published stuff. No one came. So I'm going to go, you know, play a video game, right? Like people didn't care. So the second innovation the social media companies had was we'll offer you attention. We'll have this social compact like Facebook. I write about this in Deep Work. Facebook was like, we'll have this sort of collectivist type of social compact that everyone will post nonsense, but everyone will look at the people they know is nonsense. In fact, we'll bring it to you because we organize it on these walls and you friend people and we can tell you like, hey, so-and just said something. And then you go over and do this performative thing where you're like, give a thumbs up or like you leave a comment. Like, that's great. And later they don't like, but I like that or whatever. And now what you're offering people is it's easy to publish content and you'll feel like people are paying attention to you. And boy, that is powerful. People love that. And that's how social media took over Web2. Anyone can publish and will make you all feel like you're important. And so everyone started doing it. And now you have massive amounts of content that you can monetize with advertisements, right? I'm not going to hire 20 writers. I have 200 million people publishing all day long because their friends will like on it. And we can put ads in the middle of all that. So that was how social media took over Web2. And then social media had its own revolution where after everyone was using these services, they said, we're no longer going to use this model of people are going to pay attention to You. Now we're going to bring an algorithmic curation and say, well, once you have this app here, we're just going to pull from the billion people who are using this. We We'll pull stuff that's going to press your buttons. And now what we're selling you is like, eh, it's not your friend liking something. You're kind of bored with that, but we'll just give you something every time you open this that's really interesting. Once we already captured you, we'll switch you over to algorithmic engagement because now you'll use it 10 to 20 X more per day than when you were just looking for likes because you only Look for likes after you publish something. That took over all of Web 2. But that's not fundamental to the internet. That's a very successful but very specific business model. People publish for free. And in exchange, algorithms show you the most compelling stuff that other people publish. It is a very specific business model. That is not synonymous with the internet. ([Time 0:49:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9cbc4dd3-fd08-48c0-8f7e-026bda4114e1)) - **Musician Quit Socials To Reclaim Creativity** - Scott, a musician, built a large following early on then quit most social platforms in 2021 to improve his creative output. - He regained artistic depth while sacrificing cultural relevance and followers. Transcript: Cal Newport Scott said, I stumbled upon your excellent work after purchasing Deep Work on a whim and wanted to congratulate you on both defining and providing workable solutions for one of the Biggest challenges of our always connected modern age. I was one of the first musicians to use social media to build a large following in the early 2010s as a pianist and founder of a popular music group. For a long time, I was a champion of social media tools. In particular, the way they granted artists the ability to build a worldwide audience while bypassing record labels and other traditional industry gatekeepers. I even got a book deal out of it. Fast forward to now, and it's clear to me that social media has actually had a net deleterious effect on the arts. Just as we see in knowledge work, engagement-based algorithms prioritize the cheap dopamine hit of a shallow content rather than the kind, deep, thoughtful, artistic work that nourishes The soul. Some of the true masters of their craft today are reduced to performing inane TikTok dance challenges or parroting trendy ideological talking points instead of creating the brilliant Work that they are uniquely suited to create. I could go on and on, but I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir here. I deleted my own personal socials with the exception of Substack in 2021, and I think it has greatly improved my creative output at the expense of my own cultural relevance. I think that it is the trade-off that artists and academics and everyone else will have to be incentivized to accept if we were to reverse what the last decade or so of McLuhan's global Village on steroids has wrought. All right. So I think that's a great case study for this musician. Social media was everything. A great case for it. Worldwide audience, get past the gatekeepers, go straight, you know, get music straight to people. Great Kevin Kelly arguments, a thousand true fans. Then he's like, it got worse. And the net fact was a negative. He quit it. He's never been, never been like prouder of his work. ([Time 0:58:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db82ad96-e000-4768-ac11-59082d00e84b)) - **Push Policy And Cultural Change** - Consider policy and cultural moves: restrict youth access, reform Section 230, and stigmatize excessive public use. - Prioritize keeping adolescents off curated, algorithmic conversation platforms until brains mature. Transcript: Cal Newport And we're sort of seeing why this is a problem already. Let's kill this, Jesse. There's a lot of ads on here, by the way. That's somehow like metaphor that like the website for this article is so covered in ads, it's kind of unusable. Technology! But we're seeing here the issue, not just that Congress necessarily doesn't know a lot about these technologies. When you understand things like the slope of terribleness, they're talking to the wrong CEOs. They're talking to the CEOs of companies that are at, their services are being picked up by disassociated youth at the bottom of the slope of terribleness i mean yes great we should talk To the existing companies and and have them turn off this behavior but more ones are going to come because what you need these sort of i i think of them as like loosely regulated digital Conversation spaces these are the end game of falling down the slope of terribleness distraction demoderation, the disassociation. And then finally, when you're disassociated, you want to be around other disassociated people and you egg each other on. There have been plenty of sites to do this. They often get shut down and then other ones come along. And because it's not, this is not hard technologically to have a place where people can do like voice chat, like a discord server that anyone can spool up on their own machine, or you have Some sort of forum and they shut these down. Like remember 4chan? Well, that got shut down, but then they started 8chan and then that got shut down. And now that's gone. There was like the Nazi website, their stormer and that got shut down. And often the way these get shut down eventually is there, they become such a cesspool. It's actually the infrastructure providers. Like i'm not going to do business with you i mean i think what took h hand down was cloudflare which is you know you need that to prevent denial of service attacks like you need it to keep In general your website up and running and they eventually like i oh we don't want to be in business with you and so with no one to protect them the site became unusable right so like it's Sure, it's good. I mean, existing forum companies keep the pressure on. Do not be a cesspool for disaffected youth. You are a specific company. You should be responsible for what people are talking about. If you have to be accused of being censorious, be accused of being censorious. Do not let disaffected youth to be on there. But anything can function here. And so I think that's the wrong place to look. The right place to look is what is tumbling people down into these below ground depths of the loosely regulated web. And that's curated conversation platforms. That's where the concern is. And it's almost not even worth bringing in CEOs of these companies, which they do. Let's bring Zuckerberg in. You know, sure. You can bring Musk in. The current administration won't bring him in, but you could, right? You can bring these people in, but what can they say, right? Again, it's like bringing in the head of Domino's and being like, look, you know, pizza's bad. What can you do to help us out here? And they're like, this is our business is pizza. What do you want us to do? That's what we do. We sell pizza. Curated conversation platforms is they use algorithms plus large groups of people in conversation to generate lots of eyeballs that they monetize. Like that's the business, right? So if you really want to step in here, I don't even know what the exact solution is, but there's a couple of things to catch my attention. I'm definitely interested in Australia's model of a nationwide ban on social media writ large, be expansive instead of contractive here for 16 or younger. We could do that if we know the slope of terribleness is inevitable. Let's keep people off it until at the very least their brain has developed more because you know what makes that slope super steep? Having a adolescent or prepubescent brain. Do you remember being a teenager? Did anything matter more to your brain than social inclusion, social grouping, what group you're in on and out on, what was going on with your friends, pleasing your community, being A part of a tribe? Those parts of your brain get supercharged doing those years in your life. You combine that brain with algorithmic conversation platforms. I mean, what was like a blue trail becomes a black diamond. You just fall fast. At the very least. Yeah. Let's keep them off. We do this with lots of other things with kids. Nicotine is very addictive. It's super addictive in like a 12 year old's brain. So we're like, you know, no kids can't, they cannot consent to the lifetime addiction they're going to get by using this. They cannot make that decision. They're way more, um, they were more prone to it. So no, you have to be older to smoke cigarettes. It messes with their brains and alcohol. Let's wait till your brain develops before we're going to allow you to, you know, the drink alcohol. You're not making good decisions yet, so we don't want you behind the wheel of a car until you've gone through training and you can be older. And sure, for all of these things, you can argue, but no, you're holding people back. You don't let a 15-year drive a car. You're restricting their freedom of movement, and you can't restrict the freedom of movement of people in America, but you can for kids. They can't fully consent to these things. Why can't a kid smoke a cigarette? Well, because their brain's not ready for it. They can do it when they're older. Why can't they go to an R-rated movie by themselves when they're 15? Because we think kids aren't ready for this material or they're not going to make a good decision on their own. So no, you just can't do it. I think we should do something similar for social media. ([Time 1:12:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ccae29a6-6915-455b-94ff-a7e03c1e35f6))