Welcome back. We are live here in the situation room with Balaji Srinivasan and Taylor Lorenz, which might be their first time ever meeting.
I think so. Is this Wow. Certainly first time ever appearing on a podcast together. Uh we're live stream. Yes, that's right.
Yeah, we're really grateful to have you here. Thanks so much for coming on.
Good to be here. Um should I should we get started? Can I can I uh ask some questions? It's good.
Go for it.
All right. All right. So, first just you know, Taylor, clear the air. Uh I have no issues with you. I wish you the best in life. I'm happy you've become an independent creator and so on and so forth. Looks like you're living your best life. Do you have any issues with me? Are we good?
I don't think so. I Yeah, that Thank you for saying that, Balaji. I think you were not You had a different tune, but that's okay. I know how the internet goes. Um but yeah, excited to have a conversation and and chat. Um so okay so I have a few questions for you. So first individuals versus institutions. Um this is actually something I think that we've both thought a lot about. Uh there's been a trend of really prominent creators like uh you know let's call them writers Nate Silver, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal, Bari Weiss, Tucker Carlson from across the political spectrum that have now gone and done their own Substacks, their own podcasts. Uh you know you're right in the middle of that. How do you how do you see that? What what do you think catalyzed that? Do you think that's going to continue?
Yeah, I um I wrote a book that's somewhere behind me falling uh on the bookshelf back there called Extremely Online. Um that actually charts the rise of the content creator industry, which I'm sure you know as well, but for people that um that don't, I think a lot of people, especially when COVID hit and everybody was pushed online in 2020, um started to realize that the internet had sort of effectively become the default real world. Like we're all getting more online than ever. The internet is shaping the sort of offline world increasingly. Um, and especially people in Silicon Valley, even though they had invested in sort of these platforms, I think that's when they started to really recognize the influencer world, for lack of a better word, the content creator industry, distributed media, new media, whatever you want to call it, um, you saw them funding, they invented the term the creator economy, and they sort of started to like fund it. And so I think a lot of people in tech started to really recognize this shift in media that had been happening for quite a while. Um, as I write in my book, this shift and people that follow a lot of these platforms obviously know is not something that just happened in 2020 or happened even recently with social media. I started as a blogger. So um, I actually was writing on blogs, right? And that's how I got popular. You mentioned Nate Silver, Matt Taibbi. I think a lot of us millennials like that was sort of the TikTok of our day, right? Was where you could go. Um, so I started independent as a blogger and the blogger ecosystem was very robust in the 2010s even prior to sort of social media as we think of now. So I think this trend of media becoming more digital and more distributed is not that's been happening for 30 years and will continue and I think it gets press cycles uh you know come and go but but I think that it's a sort of a broader trend than just anything that's happened in the past couple years. What's happened now is that it's easier for independent creators to monetize, whereas back when I was a blogger, it was, you know, you could put some like display ads on, but you could there weren't sort of brand deals uh in place in the same way that there are now.
I think that's right. I think that's why um you're right that creator economy was kind of a neologism and some maybe a late adopting thing but I think the economy part is as you correctly point out the novel part the fact that Substack grows and people can make careers actually quite good money on Substack.
But Patreon I would say Patreon paved the way for that yeah because Patreon launched in 2013 and really developed that subscriber direct subscriber sort of relationship. It's just that Patreon was primarily doing that for video and Substack was doing it for writing. Of course, now all of them and Beehiiv are doing every you know now they have podcast, video, everything. But um but I do think that that Patreon pioneered the subscription.
I guess that's perhaps because there was a more of a tradition of so independent film and so and people started with independent film first and then it it came to independent journalism. Is that do you think that's what happened?
No, I would say it was content creators. It was YouTubers, right? It was these independent people that were out there producing um you know incredible content whether that was on Patreon or sorry it was on YouTube and then Instagram as well short form video we saw the rise of all of those live streaming apps in the mid-2010s as well like we're the previous live streaming we're in another live streaming boom but 15 years ago there was a previous live streaming or sorry 10 years ago around 2015 um so I think that these these models have have been taking place for a while It's just that I think that the mainstream media and um the tech industry and sort of more elite circles um you're starting to see it sort of bleed up to that whereas they used to as we well when I was a when I started as a blogger there were a lot of conversations and sort of machinations of like are bloggers actually journalists right and I think there was this um you know this elitist view of people that made content on the internet or people that did reporting for the internet and now I think that's basically gone away uh where it's not seen as something different at least not by anybody that has more than two.
I think that's right and I think that's right and actually I think there's a dimension to that where there's a period where quote the blogger was below the journalist but now the online creator has an audience that's often orders of magnitude larger than you know a traditional journalist. So the internet has kind of ascended to being the primary where the culture is.
Well, some of those bloggers were doing journalism too, right? That's why we all ended up in mainstream media. Um I think like a lot of them were doing amazing journalism. I mean look at the way that bloggers uh were sort of covering the Iraq war and putting punching holes in in US narratives. The reason that we know about all the waterboarding stuff was that amazing I can't remember her name uh blogger that sort of went through all these transcripts. So I think I think that that was happening. I think that a lot of legacy institutions, as I've written about in my book and throughout my career, have really struggled to adapt to that shift because they do want that top-down broadcast model of media. Um, unfortunately, I do think we have this new sort of ecosystem of gatekeepers, for lack of a better word, and that is the tech platforms themselves.
Yeah, I I actually agree that that's why um decentralization and cryptocurrency and blockchain and so on and so forth.
I know you're big on that stuff.
I am big on that. That's right. Part of the reason I'm big on that is for internet freedom because otherwise PayPal can freeze your funds, seize your funds. But
Absolutely agree. Yeah. I mean, yes, I cover that stuff all the time. I totally agree with you. I think it's horrifying.
You know, there's something else actually which interesting area of potential intersection. You've written, I think, about age verification laws and so on and so forth. And often they have good intent. um they're they're the you know like the the wedge thin edge of the wedge of just you know basically deanonymizing the internet and not allowing people to kind of read you know and you know Russia and especially China are far down that spectrum in terms of a controlled top down internet I think in that part of the world let's say the state has really won over the network and here I do kind of think the network may be stronger like here being actually the Anglo speaking world do you disagree with that
Oh my god Balaji no I totally agree with that. Look at what's happening. We've got over what is it 25 states right now with uh age verification laws on the books. Identity verification as you said. We have I mean this is the Democrats are making this a primary topic that they are pushing mass surveillance and I mean we have the Kids Online Safety Act, KOSA 2.0 um the Kids Act with that broader group that you know of of laws that includes KOSA that went through in the house made it out of committee. I I just I I I disagree. I think there's this I mean I just covered the social media addiction trial. I I don't know. I do think that we're in the midst of this crisis right now where um there is there there there's almost no one fighting for internet freedoms. We have Fight for the Future, the EFF, a few civil rights groups, a few human rights groups, but overwhelmingly I don't see a lot of support from the public unfortunately and I hope this changes um to fight these horribly dangerous laws that will destroy the internet. I mean your your correlation with China and Russia is correct. Um that is a version of the internet I think we should fight against. Um but unfortunately I yeah I don't know I don't see that happening right now.
So so the thing is I uh I'm seeing a bunch of tech coming up and I'm seeing political roots. So um again this will be red blue coded but hopefully I can just speak about this impartially or what have you.
We're not talking about politics. I think this is an issue that should be like and no where no matter where you are in the political spectrum you should not want to have to scan your enter your biometric data and upload your driver's license to read a Wikipedia article. That's crazy.
Completely agree. I I think um there are there is a pro-freedom movement in some ways, internet freedom. So latent I mean to be clear, there's all kinds of crypto scams and you know speculation stuff that that rise in crypto, but there's latent potential there and some of it realized for true internet freedom because it's a way of funding things in a decentralized way. It's a way of operating things outside of platforms. It's open source programmable. Um, and there's like new VPNs, for example, like Obscura is like a new VPN for like busting through the great firewall. There's Starlink. And I think, um, you know, in general, space-based internet access is going to become a bigger thing where, you know, even states can't clip under seas cables. Uh, and I think um that many states are going to have the the second move is going to be that if you filter and control the internet too much, it actually harms your economy. And so then states will have to kind of come back. And maybe you disagree with that. Go ahead.
I just I don't know. I you know I we these platforms don't require free speech to make a profit. Um we know look at Meta, look at Google. These companies will happily trade away our free speech rights, you know, to make a to have a more friendly regulatory environment to be more seem more appear more friendly to advertisers. Like I just don't trust them to protect our rights at all. I I don't I hear you on all the crypto stuff and I talk to people in the crypto world and they like tell me all it's going to be fine. We're gonna get decentralized. This is and I just I don't know. I just don't see that happening on like a mass adoption scale yet at least anytime soon.
So let me let me give uh let me give a few more. So first of all I agree with you that bad forces are converging. However, there's another piece of the puzzle now which is we can actually use AI and things like that to actually rapidly clone interfaces of existing scaled apps and then just swap out the back
And then and then Meta comes after you abusing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to get your app shut down or you can't get on the app store or whatever you know
Maybe the app store I agree by the way the app store and the Android and the Google Play Store are bottlenecks but there's sort of being a degree of return to desktop and then the question is whether they're going to be doing packet filtering at like you know the the router level and so on and so forth and then you've got Starlink. I I I think that you know there's there's a tension between what I call cloud and land where to have global markets to have a following that's very large globally you kind of want the open internet but then all these states and all these groups want to have a closed internet so I think that there's there is a tension between those two things um and I think it's going to play out differently uh one thing I will say is the open web is also under attack right now because um you know if you notice just like Google incognito like it'll always prompt you for some captcha nowadays you may have noticed that right and that's because people keep you know hitting the open web and you know stealing not stealing let's say downloading data for training AI models so lots of the open web GitHub for example is down a lot because of this so a lot of things are going to have micro
Also the Internet Archive we might lose Internet Archive because
Yeah of of the same sort of nonsense
So so this is actually an interesting area where I think we're both. Uh I mean I'm sure we'll have many differences because you but but internet freedom is definitely an area I think that we
So you should you have billions of millions of dollars. You should fight these laws. You should put money to destroy these identity verification laws. There's so much money on the other side. There's so much money and then you have these cynical companies like Meta that will on one hand sort of fight you know their certain laws that benefit them but then now they're advocating for the App Store Accountability Act which would remove complete anonymity from there. So we can't trust these companies. So you you know I'm not the millionaire in the room. So I think you should back some of these groups fighting a lot.
In fact actually I I do fund a lot of stuff like this like a lot of VPN encryption type stuff. Uh I think so some of that you know for example we just did Zcash recently which is truly encrypted private um capital. Uh it's like basically Bitcoin but with zero knowledge. Um zero knowledge in particular. Is that an area you're following at all?
Yeah, a little bit because people are saying like, 'Oh, we'll use zero knowledge to do the identity stuff.'
Yes. So, so there's actually a proposal there if you're talking about like Coinbase put a proposal to do ZKYC. So, let's say the state has some let's just give the benefit of the doubt and say they have a legitimate interest in making sure that there's not a North Korean passport or something like that that you know, fine then that that you're not on some terrorist blacklist, whatever. you can actually prove just that and only that without giving up anything else. And I actually think there will be an economic incentive for this stuff because we're going to need to do a lot more proof of human to log onto sites, but we also want to give up all this information because all the hacks and so on. So that's an important direction that we are funding now. But a lot of these things what happens is you fund them and they're like seeds and they sprout three, five, eight, 10 years later, you know.
Yeah. Um and but but some of the regulations are happening now. I I just think that we need people to really wake up and and rally. I mean, I ironically Persona [laughter] uh and I will give Rick some credit because he is so he really engages the CEO like really engages. I completely disagree with the concept of his company or the you know the fact that it's needed but they have a great um tracker that they made for you know tracking some of these state level laws and federal laws around and I think it tracks globally um of this sort of effort to age verify the web.
Yeah, we're seeing it in the UK. We're seeing it here. I just I I don't know why there's not more of a coalition fighting against these laws. To me, this is like again something that shouldn't be a left or the right issue. Um the far-right religious fundamentalists have always wanted to censor the internet, right? That's like they've been trying to do that since the Communications Decency Act, but now we see these like liberal like ostensibly liberal groups getting on board with it and Democrats leading the effort. You see Gavin Newsom talking about, you know, wanting to ban social media for under 16s, like all this. Keir Starmer, I I think it's so incredibly dangerous. It's an affront to everything that the internet stands for. And um and and I just think that people need to wake up and and stop feeding this moral panic about sort of kids in the internet and and fight.
How do you how do you convince sort of ordinary parents like you have people who are just constantly surrounded by this like pedo panic on the internet? Like if you let your kids go on social media, they're going to be totally brained. They're going to be groomed. Um and you know, sometimes this does happen. So how do you convince like ordinary parents that no, like it isn't that good for kids to be on the internet in some ways?
Well, it's Go ahead. I was going to say Balaji.
Yeah, I was going to say I do think parents should probably keep their kids off the uncensored, unfiltered internet for a long time. Uh [laughter] but that is a little different than whether um the thing is Democrats will justify almost anything on the base of safety and Republicans on the base of security.
Well, the Republicans are also Exactly. on security. Yes. Correct.
On security. Exactly. Right. So safety versus security. There's actually a famous old um cartoon which is how do you want this wrapped? And it's like control.
I love that cartoon. You know the one I'm talking about.
So good. Yes. Mike Masnick posted it. I love it.
Great. So maybe you can put that on screen, right? And so like the Democrat version is like protect kids and the Republican version is like national security or something like that.
And the thing is those are not necessarily always false. It's just that the way that they have tended to be interpreted in the Anglo world. Yeah, I think that might be it, right?
Yeah, we got it. We got on stream. Can we put it up?
Yeah. When did that come out? That was like 20 years ago, 30 years ago.
Well, this is the whole concept of the Communications Decency Act to begin with, right? This is how we thankfully have Section 230 still, although they want to dismantle that. Right.
Yes. And I think um we one thing that is I believe going to be on the other side of this. What what is a coalition for the free internet look like? It is essentially um it has to in some part be uh those people who make capital from a free internet as opposed to a closed internet. And again, you know, it's really you're right that um we should be more public about talking about some of these things. There's a bunch of things that I've funded um that you know my my my colleagues have funded with me and and and separately that actually are for this stuff and we can put that out there and there's a whole freedom stack right it's not just cryptocurrency and private currency it's VPNs it is uh you know anti-surveillance technology for example there's something I'm looking at where um you can block it when someone's recording you right like it uh it's it's like you put down a device and then that that microphone just gets white noise and and it blocks the recording. There's a whole stack of this type of stuff which protects your freedom, privacy and so on in the digital era.
We should talk about that more. I think that's amazing and I love those products and I support all the entrepreneurs that are building these types of things. Yes, that's the that's the great um cartoon I think that that was put up. But um yeah, I mean I support I I support that. I just think that we need people to be a little bit more vocal too. I think that these tech companies have really played both sides of the issue. Um Chris Best from Substack to be fair has like spoken up about it, but they still are complying with it. Blue Sky uh spoke up and sort of didn't want to or were trying to not comply um but then ultimately did comply. Pornhub has pulled out of certain states. I just think it's really hard because [laughter] because we need like we need a stronger coalition and I think we need more tech people to get involved and talk about the fact that like this is bad for business. This is bad. I mean, I was talking to somebody even just from who runs like a mesh uh networking or a messaging app for that people use for protests and stuff and he's like, 'How am I supposed to do, you know, age verification or these Linux developers,' right, that have gotten very mobilized on this issue that are like, 'What do you mean operating? Like, do you even know how this works?' Like so many people writing these laws like they don't have a basic understanding of technology. So, yeah. And that doesn't mean that you should give your kid unfiltered internet access to the No, no one is saying that. What we're saying is you actually have enterprise level surveillance tools to use on your children currently that are consumer tools if you want to. If that's the mode of parenting that you want to go and you want to restrict them from the internet, you have the tools to do that now. But we do not want the government to come in and remove all anonymity from the internet so that Johnny doesn't see the wrong uh video when he's 15.
Well, well, the thing is also the justification for it is always going to be child safety or national security, which it doesn't which doesn't even be extended. it'll be extended to much more than that, right? And so that's I think uh the civil libertarian, you know, angle on this. Um, you know, it's funny. I think that the coalition for this is probably going to be, as you mentioned, Linux, more on the crypto and open-source side than the web two side. And the reason is web two like the entire 2000s was about like you had the initial open web of everything was a client and server and then web two was the only way you could scale was you had a centralized database and a hub and you could serve ads against that
And so the whole thing is about how do you decentralize the backend and you know it's funny all of that now finally works you can now blast transactions on chain and you're seeing that with stable coins and other kinds of things but it's one of those things where I can point to it and then one day they'll be like an explosive product that actually arises out of that, you you will see it. But I think you're right that we should uh we should accelerate on that.
So one one other thing like please like get it like if to anyone watching like we have to kill these laws. Like if these laws go through they just set this horrible legal precedent that is so anti-innovation that is so anti-freedom. Like we just we don't want to give the government power over online speech over online content. Now they're trying this ridiculous sort of way to try to circumvent Section 230 around like addictive design. and like, 'Oh my god, you made the product too good. People are now listening to nine hours of music on Spotify. They're addicted to music. You know, we need to This is a ridiculous concept.' So, I I just think like we really need to I I want people in the tech industry to be a bit more vocal about it. And don't be, you know, they try they'll be like, 'Oh, you're defending you know what? You don't want children to be safe. That's a ridiculous premise and we should reject those those premises.' So, so the thing about it is I think um in between, let's call it American anarchy and Chinese control, you know, where there's like an American style of just total freedom for everything and the Chinese top-down style. I think there is like an internet intermediate where people can opt into constraints. And the issue here is that that's like a bunch of different subcultures, but the exact constraints are being chosen from them by a top-down system. They don't actually necessarily align with what what they want. Um, you might see a lot of digital tribes where there's a free internet within that tribe and then it's untrusted internet outside it. Um,
Which is bad. I want us to like because then then like that keeps kids less safe too. It's like then they're just going to the unfiltered like this. I just want like a free and open internet for everyone and I don't want any I don't want like some mom in Missouri to have to learn how to use like crypto technology or whatever to to freely express herself online. You know,
It it's interesting because those states that can't regulate the internet will uh may not make it. And um it's we we'll see what happens on this, but because if they can't control the flow of capital and speech in their borders, let me let me give another kind of thing which is actually um another angle that you didn't bring up, but that a lot of folks on the right think about is uh scripting drones,
You know, on territory, right? Like what Ukraine did and Russia, right? They can remotely control a drone. And as humanoid robots get better, you know, more than 10 years ago, there's a company called Double Robotics. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, like telepresence. So, you can with an iPad.
Yeah. So, I would attend meetings at A16Z with with It's actually pretty cool. Even [laughter] 10 years ago, this stuff existed. And and even back then I gave a talk which said that your immigration policy becomes your firewall because if you can animate like you let's say you put on a VR headset and you're not controlling uh a you can first you can control a drone but now you're controlling a humanoid robot and it's animating around right just the ability to send packets around the world means you can literally be there physically and kind of walk around and do things. So that kind of challenges our notion of what border control is. And and you know, China has actually put out a whole set of statements for 20 years. They've said their control of digital packets across a border is on par with their control of physical packets against the border. And they've always framed it as a security issue. And now that's actually becoming something that's harder to ignore because it is true that if anybody can send a packet to anybody, you can control a robot and so on and so forth. Of course, it also means you can do telesurgery and you can do all kinds of great stuff. You can monitor your factories remotely. There's a lot of obviously good stuff beyond just the extreme edge case of, you know, some some terrorist using a drone, but I do think we're going to renegotiate digital borders, so to speak, like what is allowed, what is disallowed.
Anyway, okay. So, good topic, something to think about, and I I may put out like a a set of things on what we're funding. I have a you know, kind of another question for you, something, you know, here's here's a funny way. Let me let me some 2020 speech, you know. So um the you know the New York Times owned by a guy Arthur Sulzberger. He's you know son of his father's father's father's father and you as a woman and me as a person of color could never be the publisher of the New York Times right we actually had to go independent to the international
Never say never. I don't want to be the publisher of the New York Times. I don't think you want that either.
I don't I don't want that either. But but basically actually I would argue until really maybe the 2010s 2020s there really wasn't freedom of speech because you didn't you know freedom of press belongs to those who own one right like never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel right there's radio licenses and TV licenses and newspaper licenses so in a sense we're actually in if you zoom out arguably the golden age of the free internet and free speech and so forth in
I think that the I think that the 2000s honestly were the most free with blogging. Um, but I think maybe you got a little bit more freedom in the 2010s because of distribution and the ability to reach people at scale through social media, but I think we're in a regression. I mean, I do I um agree with Jacob. I'm going to mispronounce his last name, Mchangama. Uh, he I'm a huge fan, but he wrote about uh, you know, sort of like we're experiencing this global free speech recession. And I do think that again because we are seeing this um, escalation of internet censorship, mass surveillance. Um, I think that there is no one I mean I was told by a speaking to an activist recently about kind of again fighting these identity verification laws, you know, child safety sort of um I put that in quotes because they're not real child safety laws. They're identity verification laws. Um, and she said, you know, don't even say free speech. Like it's not an issue that young people support these days. And I think we see that through the polling where young people do not support free speech. So I think this is a civil liberty people are willing to trade off. I think that a lot of it has I think that the techlash has fed a lot of it. I think this moral panic over sort of misinformation. Um I think that I think it's just a value that increasingly is seen as like dangerous, right? People this this idea of dangerous speech and misinformation and I think a lot of people that have I don't know honestly. I think there's probably a lot of other socioeconomic factors. I don't know honestly. I there's probably sellers that have thought
I can give one thesis or kind of contributing thing you know what uh if you look at the graph of Google and Facebook ad revenue it goes up to the right and like print media revenue goes down like this and there's similar graph for like Chinese manufacturing it goes up to the right and like the US share of global manufacturing so in a sense to to very roughly say like the internet disrupted let's say blue America and China disrupted red America and so that means many people in both blue and red America are very negative on both China and the internet and because they look at their lives are getting worse as Asia and China and the internet rising and getting better. So that is in my view driving a lot of nostalgia um
And a lot of pro-China sentiment as well where like there's a lot of people that that are like and by the way there's a lot to like about China that they have a lot of good things in China. I what we should not seek to replicate is the infrastructure of their internet which is so heavy on surveillance and very dystopian I would argue sort of version of that.
I think it's I think it's this is a big and complicated topic. I think China is very competent but I also think China's a lot like Apple where you can't run the software without the hardware or vice versa. And so they would even say themselves like it's you know their system isn't meant to be exported and and so forth. So I think trying to do China outside China, it might work in like Vietnam or places like that that are very culturally similar and close, but I don't think I think they're going to try it in place like Canada. Maybe you know Newsom is close to Xi and so
What do you mean by do China? Like what policies? [laughter]
Well, so for example, actually MAGA is trying to do China outside China. Example tariffs, right? Example, the focus on re-industrialization. Even the obsession over Taiwan is basically, you know, arguably this is a whole thing. The last 10 years can be seen as both blue and red America trying to clone China where Republicans rejected free trade to go for tariffs and you know and and Democrats rejected free speech. There's an Atlantic article said China's right about
Republicans also reject free speech though. Let's be clear that that is something that both of them don't like.
That's right. And Biden was also, you know, for the he had his own Build Back Better, you know, re-industrialization campaign. It's a bipartisan thing. I'm just saying just in terms of where the
Yeah. Yeah. the vibes. Yeah.
There's been there's been an aspect of implicit China envy on both sides. Even for example, copying COVID lockdowns was copying, you know, China did that first, then the US went second. And in many ways, uh the issue is that if you're copying something without admitting you're copying it, then it's going to be very bad. It's like saying, I'm going to copy Google. Let me set up a website. Well, obviously there's a lot of depth to it that you have to study, you know, to to do that. And uh so trying to do China outside China, another example of that is many countries actually buy weapons from both America and China, but the American weapons are pointed out. They're like pointy missiles, but the Chinese stuff is pointed inward, it is the security state and the monitoring and and so on and so forth. And uh I do think that you know with Carney's deal with China um that's a huge deal if you saw that you know in in a sense here's a funny line. Uh, okay. I I know political people say like Carney is maybe the most important American liberal and Nayib Bukele is the most important American conservative even though Carney's a Canadian and Bukele's a Latin American and there are different models but basically Carney is very much uh the first that really went into the Chinese camp and I think you're going to see others follow and there are many things that are like you have to just respect China's execution in terms of being number one in steel and number one in cars and all that type stuff but I don't think you can copy China outside China. Um, people will try, but I don't think it'll actually work. And
Try Yeah, I think it's it's going to be bad.
Yeah, exactly. That's why I say like I think they so I should be clear. I think that people will try, but I think that will be bad. Um, when when people do try um because they're going to copy like some surface level piece without copying. I mean, China went through a hundred years of churn. And you know they it's it's not just communism, it's Confucianism, it's legalism, it's like all of these different traditions that are merged together and they have the rule and the exception to the rule and the exception to the rule and and so on and so forth. Um, so, uh, one thing I, you know, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for young creators, you know, one, one of the things funny is I never thought, you know, I'm in a sense a technologist that became a creator and you are, uh, a creator who's at least I mean, you've always been interested in tech, but you're more focused on that perhaps now than you were in the past. Maybe maybe I'm wrong about that.
I love tech. No, that's I got into this because I love technology. So, so what's your, you know, for for people who are just starting out, should they join the New York Times or should they go and go independent?
You know, people ask me this all the time. I think it depends on who you are and what you ultimately want to do when you're young. I think absolutely do not join a legacy media organization. That would be insane. Do not do that if you're under the age of 35, honestly, because you want to develop skills and you're not going to develop skills, especially digital skills, at a legacy media organization that's sort of slowly atrophying. But at the same time, I'm glad that I did time and I still freelance for legacy media. I'm glad that I learned a lot. I was so critical, I know how critical you are of the New York Times. When I started out, when I was a blogger, that's what got me into blogging was reading the mainstream media, their delusional coverage of tech, the condescending way that they talked about independent media. And I thought, I'm going to write my own articles. I'm going to become a blogger. I can publish my own stuff. And then, I think working in those newsrooms made me realize there is a lot to learn. There's a lot of really amazing benefits that comes with working at those places.
Talk about that for a second. How does that work? Like what is the culture like? How does a story arise? How do the editors get involved? How does that work?
Yeah, I mean I can only speak to the tech team and working on tech, and I was on the style section briefly too. It's a lot of journalists that genuinely care about their beats, genuinely want to write about things. Sometimes they pitch stories, sometimes they get a story, whatever. You go out, you report the story, you do interviews, you write it up, it gets published and edited. It's pretty straightforward. Now, I think each desk is different. Each reporter is different. Each editor is different. So, there's a lot of dynamics. I have a lot of problems with legacy media and the editorial output that they often engage in. But overall, I think the reporters there are not the problem. I think management at some of these legacy media places can be not great. And I mean not great in the sense that I loved my editor. The tech editor at the New York Times is brilliant, and I'm sorry, I know that's going to trigger some people to say, but she really is. But I think that management at some legacy media organizations sometimes doesn't always understand the business models, the changing nature of media, and they can make dumb decisions by mismanaging legacy media. But I think there's a lot to learn from legacy media. I think that people there generally try to find the truth and generally try to adhere to journalistic standards, which is not something that everybody in the creator industry does.
So post 2021, one thing that we observed in tech is there had been a lot of Twitter fights between journalists and technologists pre-2021, but then after that it seemed to actually drop off a fair bit. Do you have any, was there a directive, was it said like, hey, don't get invites on X or something?
I think Andy Stone is a little bit less online now out there fighting with journalists. I mean I wouldn't call him a technologist but I think that a lot of the ways that these companies engage directly with journalists was online. I think it was more sort of, I can't remember if it started really pre-2020 but certainly once the techlash started and you had this much more antagonistic relationship between media and tech, you saw a lot of tech companies take to the internet and try to quote tweet reporters and say that's not true or have these conversations in public, which I actually think is a benefit. That's good. I want to see those conversations happen publicly. I think it's good that they're happening, because I think sometimes there are things that maybe don't make it in a story that a company or a founder might feel like they really want included or they want out there. So I like that founders now have a voice online. Because I think it holds journalists accountable. I always say that the fact that I write about people, I write about influencers primarily, and the fact that they have a massive megaphone and can respond to me, I think makes me a better reporter. It makes me sure that when I'm going to come with a story, it's correct, and they can't sort of say, you know what I mean? There's more accountability that way. But I don't know. I wouldn't say it was a post-2021 thing. I think everyone was just so online in 2020. I mean, so everybody was sort of fighting, but I don't think it was a top-down thing. I think also the platforms changed too. You had Elon take over Twitter. You saw the fracturing of Twitter. TikTok is where a lot more cultural conversation happens now.
Well, right. So, exactly. Right. So, the fracturing is a big thing. I was going to ask you next because now we've gone from Twitter to actually Twitter's dead. So, there's X, there's Blue Sky, there's Truth, there's Substack, there's TikTok, and Threads, Mastodon. Most of these seem like they don't have much real discourse on them though.
Oh god. Go on Blue Sky, Theo. There's discourse you couldn't even imagine on there. Maybe Blue Sky social is real. TikTok. TikTok is where I mean I think there's discourse. Is it productive discourse? No. I'd argue that the discourse on Threads and Blue Sky is insular and unproductive. I think TikTok is where cultural conversation happens now in a way that it doesn't happen. I think Twitter, sorry, X is the nexus for tech and politics, but I think pop culture has moved to TikTok and YouTube to a lesser extent.
Yes. So, it's interesting because the thing is, do you think, I mean in some ways I think 4chan and TikTok have sort of taken over where 4chan used to be its own thing and kind of off to the side or what have you, and now it's actually just on X. Yeah. I feel like they just are like it's just X extended. Yes. So where do all, I mean mainstream media used to all be on Twitter with blue checks, right? Where are they hanging out now? Are they still on Twitter? Are they on other channels? Do they move to Substack? Did it split into a bunch of different factions. How should we think about that?
I think it depends on what they're covering. The tech reporters are certainly all still on X. Political reporters are more on X than ever. I think pop culture, other people that cover other beats are not as much. Just again because the discussion happening, one of my friends I was talking to is a music reporter. She spends all her time on TikTok. TikTok has this very insane relationship with music and with audio and with artists and pop culture. So I think TikTok, I have been sort of following the change obviously with TikTok US and seeing if there's a change in that. I don't think there has been. And I think YouTube is really trying to compete. YouTube is and Instagram Reels. Ironically, I do think Instagram Reels, like it was considered boomer and lame and like this bad version of TikTok, but now there's a lot more happening on Instagram Reels.
It's very original. Reels is the platform that I and most of my friends around my age use the most, Twitter and TikTok.
Okay. I hear that all the time from people that are like 20 and under.
Why is that? What is distinct there?
I think Instagram has sort of been like the backbone of my socialization with my friends for a really long time because we have DMs and Instagram DMs are like the main channel of communication and then they added Reels and it is so easy. It is so integrated into the rest of the app. You just send a Reel to your friends and then that's a DM that's like a topic of conversation. It really locks you in there and Reels are like funny and original and I think the algorithm is really good.
Yeah, not to interrupt, I think TikTok fucked up on not leaning harder into messaging. Because Snapchat tried to be that. It's just that Evan Spiegel is kind of too scared of user-generated content. There's so many reasons, but Snapchat is primarily a messaging app for young people and they have content and that's what Discover is for but it's not quite, it doesn't have that sort of open network effect and Spotlight never really took off. And so I think Reels does have that mix of a personal social network of people that you're talking to and communication but also content.
I did use Snapchat in like middle school in what, 2015 through 2018ish.
Yeah. And then all of my use cases for Snapchat were totally consumed by Instagram because Instagram added Stories. They added DMs and they added Reels which Snapchat kind of didn't. Snapchat had this thing called Spotlight which was just terrible. Because they don't want the open. Evan is too scared to make a social platform, like a real social platform honestly. No hate Evan, but I think he thinks of safety first, but it's like, you know, it's so funny because he is probably somewhat responsible. But it's not this open network in the same way that pretty much all other social platforms are, but it hasn't saved him. Like he's still getting hauled up, pulled into the social media addiction lawsuit. People still villainize Snap along with all these other companies. I don't know why he doesn't just go for it and meaningfully compete. I don't know, he's building his glasses or whatever.
Like the culture of Instagram is much more positive than the culture of TikTok, which is in turn probably more positive than the culture of X. Like X I think of as player versus player, right? You know, like X, people just fight on X, it is just chair throwing, brawl, political combat. Very different than even it was in the early 2010s when you could still, it was easier to just talk. For example, you relatively, okay, you do see fundraising rounds announced but there was a certain style of it where people would be happy about it in the early 2010s. That's less the case. People will yell much more frequently about things, they'll be just much less happy for somebody else's success because resources are scarce and everybody's mad. But Instagram in general is a fairly positive environment of people who are going outside and healthy and what have you. And Substack is actually, Substack Notes has done quite well as a higher IQ environment. It's because everybody there is a writer. But I do think that we want to have, one issue that's happening now is there's actually a degree of mild resurgence of mainstream media simply because there's so much AI slop out there. And so, I do think we're going to need to have humanly social networks. And I think that's going to be a huge part of the future, but that also relates to the age verification stuff. It's like human verification.
I know. I hate that, but it is. I agree with you. Yeah.
And so I think with ZK, there's probably a way of squaring the circle where you can prove you're a human. Prove this was not, or at least you can't prove it was not written by AI, but you can at least say I assert it was not written by AI. And you just have something where there's just less spam and scams and slop and so on and so forth and it's a more human network. Substack is actually more like that. There's though there are a fair number of people on Substack that just write enormous reams of AI slop.
If you had just subscribed to usermag.co, my Substack newsletter, you could read a... subscribe to bllgs.com and I will check out user, I don't really write that much. Go ahead.
I just wrote, sorry to interrupt. I just wrote an article. I used Pangram. I did a little coding and I used their API to scrape all the top posts on all the best sellers of Substack to see how much AI generated content was.
Yes. I mean, the funny thing about this is in theory, so I often have this argument with my friends. And they'll say, 'Oh, you know, biology, it's theoretically impossible.' I'm like, 'Okay, maybe it's theoretically impossible, but it's practically very easy to spot. It's not this, it's that.' And yeah, various kinds of terms, especially for ChatGPT text. And if it's so good that you can't recognize it as AI, well, okay, fine, but if you can recognize it as AI, I put a finger on it. It's like, you know, Lauren, it's like Lauren AIPs, it shows that they didn't put work into it. And it's just like if they didn't put work into it, why should I as a reader put work into reading it? They just gave a very low-effort thing that they didn't check and they are communicating it and they put all the effort on the reader and it's a shortcut for the producer and it's a huge tax on the other side. And so I think as much as I like AI within the digital tribe, it accelerates coding. It's great for search, all this kind of stuff. Between digital tribes, it's often bad because it's just AI agents spamming 50 different people with a resume or a sales email or something like that and just breaks the commons. And so we're going to need to have, I think, a whole new generation of humanly social networks.
I don't know how verifiable that would be. Like you can assume some kind of biometric method of proving that you are a human. And so you have your account that says I'm Theo. I'm a human, but then on my account I can just post stuff that I generated with ChatGPT, you know, maybe with some savvy prompts to get around Pangram. And there's...
But here's the thing. Yeah. Well, here's web of trust, right? So you would have the way, so there's a whole statistical cat and mouse here, but just to give you a sense, web of trust is A asserts that B is trustworthy. Who asserts C is trustworthy? Who asserts D is trustworthy and then the trust drops off, right? You trust your friend and maybe you trust your friend's friend but probably not your friend's friend's friend's friend's friend, right? And so there's a way of modeling that mathematically and you can have not just one proof point, not just A trusts B, but also X trusts B and Y trusts B and Z trusts B and they trust them for a bunch of reasons all of which is expressed in the metadata on the edges and nodes and then you can do a calculation and inference of what is the probability that somebody continues to be human. And then you also have not just automatic Pangram-style reporting but you have manual flagging of something. There's a set of signals people can look at and I think if you establish the culture as being human only and you also take away some of the payoff for pasting just reams of AI text, I think it's possible to do. It's a little bit like Snapchat where Snapchat is disappearing messages and yes of course in theory you can take a photograph of the thing but in practice it did deter people from doing it. So you can set the culture in such a way that I think you can deter.
I think instead of, I agree with all of that. I think that people will probably just gravitate towards formats that reward, I think this is why we're seeing such a resurgence in live streaming and interest in these communal experiences because live is something that is so hard to fake, it is such a human thing. And so I think people are just gravitating towards those formats that prioritize these human communal experiences. So that's why we're doing Network School for the human part of things and having people meet up in person in Singapore or something.
Yes. Yeah. If you're in Singapore, let me know.
I saw a TikTok from one of those guys that was in it.
Yeah. So, yeah, I think that kind of thing, in-person communities is going to be important because, for example, focusing is best done in my view with pen and paper, pencil and paper offline. And if you like to be extremely offline focused with your own thoughts, now you can actually do something and then you come back and you're extremely online later. But without that offline kind of thing you don't actually have a sense of your own head, you don't have your sense of your own direction. And so I do want to have much more of that. And I think also what's happening is we have the digital divide but in reverse where in the 90s people were scared that only the wealthy would have digital everything but actually digital everything is super cheap. Like you basically have the same phone as Larry Page, the same Wikipedia as Sergey Brin or whatever, right? Same Groipedia I should say. Groipedia is far superior to Wikipedia by the way. And so you have the same digital experience that's being hyper-delated and now it's physical that's a premium product and so the digital divide is kind of in reverse. So I agree with you Taylor. I think you're going to see much more in the way of in-person and that kind of stuff.
Taylor, I am interested in your take on Wikipedia versus Groipedia because one of my favorite use cases for Groipedia is to look at articles for people who are like totally unfairly maligned on Wikipedia.
Got it. Yeah. I mean I do get annoyed at Wikipedia because there's a lot of misinformation about me on Wikipedia. Yeah. Let's pull it up. So I'm sympathetic.
You got the stuff on stream.
Yeah. Let's look at my Groipedia. I actually haven't looked at it before. It's quite long.
Look at how long this thing is. Jesus Christ. Who has time to read all this? I think I... you know, I like I said, Wikipedia is not perfect. There's misinformation on Wikipedia. Overwhelmingly though what I really like about Wikipedia and I think is good and noble is the effort is a decentralized community-driven effort to get information right and compile information and I think it's great to have competitors to that. So I'm not against the concept of any competitor to Wikipedia. I think it's a little silly when it's framed as anti-woke or whatever. I think Elon was trying to say it was like when it initially came, I don't think Wikipedia is...
It's more to it than that. So, yes, people have said, 'Oh, you know, Wikipedia is Wikipedia.' But there's actually a critique from the left as well, which is...
People have said that, but there's a critique from the left, which is it's also white and Westipedia because...
Yeah, it's not, it has a lot of flaws. And to be clear, nothing against white people or Western people and so on, but there's a critique from the right and a critique from the left that says that the kind of people who edit Wikipedia are simply not representative of the world as a whole. Right? Partly because lots of people who got online in the 2010s from India, from Asia, Africa, Latin America, they may be anglophones, they may speak whatever language, but they didn't build the political capital at the beginning to be part of Wikipedia arbcom and all this kind of stuff, right? And so that got all oified in a certain way. And even if you look at the perennial sources list or something like that, it's extremely anglophone western and so on in its orientation and it locks out new media sources, international media sources and so on and so forth at a structural level.
And so that's why I think that's something where the economy is shifted to Asia. The economy is shifting out of really out of America in many ways out of the west. And so there's an inclusion argument as well to have voices outside and I think it is definitely time for truly open source competitors. Another aspect is Wikipedia actually licenses a lot of its content to AI companies but it doesn't pay its creators.
Well the contributor, but anybody can be a contributor to Wikipedia right?
In theory but in practice you have to have like an editor history and all this kind of stuff. It's like all animals are equal but some are more equal than others as a Wikipedia editor. And the thing about that is, look, it exists and I think it did do a lot of good in the world in the early 2000s. And in fact, at that time, the insistence on only using mainstream media sources or whatever, probably at the time, I think it was less of an issue. But now today, you have a situation where something's being posted on the internet from a primary source like Jeff Bezos tweets something, but it has to get recycled, right?
Which I think is, they need to fix that.
