There’s the modification of the self but also the modification of the way you see others. One reason I’ve left a lot of platforms is I realized they were changing how I felt about other people. I was being exposed to parts of them that I didn’t like.
I think it’s important to be a bit more forgiving when they’re being those people online. I see that too — people I love, I see them online, and I’m like, who are you? This is not the same person I hang out with. This is a different person. But it’s really important to take the responsibility and the blame off individuals. It’s a behavior modification system. It’s meant to do that. It’s really well designed. People aren’t terrible. The system is terrible. You want to lift that off people, that sense of guilt or shame, and make it more about anger — anger toward the people who created this.
In an older essay about the film “The Social Network,” you wrote: “I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and — which is more important — to herself.” That really connected for me, that idea of mystery as something we actually might want to cultivate. I’m curious to hear you unpack that word — not just what is unknown, but what space is offered by mystery.
Technologies aren’t neutral. They are a philosophy and an ideology. The technology of these algorithms is the idea that everything in the world can get classified. And that’s not just a practical matter. That’s a philosophy — that there’s nothing in the world that cannot be organized, classified and labeled. And I just don’t believe that. But I also still dream of a peer-to-peer internet. And there are interesting clues as to the parts of the internet which are genuinely joyful and fantastic, of how we might go forward.
This episode (podcast) …
Mentioned:
Feel Free by Zadie Smith
“Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie Smith
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
“Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith
Book Recommendations:
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz
The Diaries of Virginia Woolf
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
