With apologies for the spell-check (which is definitely a form of censorship, btw) it is ‘kowtow’ - synonyms attached for reference

The best interviews feel like conversations and the best conversations move ideas forward. Thanks for a great conversation, Beth.

Until then just remember that fear doesn't build actual respect, lies never create useful knowledge, hatred never creates stable societies, and kindness generally makes you sleep better.

At the day job we are imagining how to improve knowledge seeking/sorting/sharing at the community level. aka Rethinking how journalism might work on messaging applications.

All failures at this scale require imagination - I hope we don't just try to plug the holes in legacy institutions but that we use the opportunity of this horrible moment in human history to imagine different institutions.

And so they call us biased, which confirms the crazy-people's theories about our/my deep-state intentions, which leads to harassment, which leads to me leaving social media which leads to...well...honestly, improved mental health.

Because the truth can really mess with your vibe if you are loving a certain way of seeing the world that makes sense to you. And this might cause you to spend less time on the platforms. And that is the truth of why social media UX engineers don't build truth loving interfaces.

It didn't work because truth wrapped in citations and placed next to your crazy uncle's favorite influencer smells a lot like institutional smartness. IMO this is a solvable UX problem and the platforms that helped run these programs never fully committed to their success in a serious way.

We are tossing heart-hands and white papers and fact-checks over the walls of the castle and wondering why it's not working.

Civil society and independent media, meanwhile, is ill-equipped to hold the line against the marauding hoard of viral and virulent culture warriors with empathy and citation rich hypermedia.

Mainstream media has an inherent bias to supporting the cultural inertia and epistemic conservatism that keep their advertisers and/or oligarchs happy. The resultant 'neutrality' loses credibility while also slowly failing in the attention economy.

This moment of history is the payout on our government's failures. Vietnam, Tuskegee, WMD, NSA Prism, AbuGhraib, Big Pharma - all amplified through the trauma, loss, and cultural long-covid of the pandemic which is looking for a scapegoat and finding it in 'the government'

Government as a massive and distant and inherently procedural body tends to lose trust and credibility like stars lose heat.

Very Hwang-esque. Good spot Devin!

This morning someone on my team asked, 'who would do this and why?' The answer is: those who benefit from our forgetting, those whose agenda is harmed by access to knowledge. For the people who want to revise history, science, and the events that describe our world, the IA is a problem.