MSP146 [] Breaking the Internet to Fix It.

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To apply, visit dg.my.g0 digital. This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury.

This is Matt Splein, and today on Matt Splein. Matt wants to break the internet. I know it's not a photo of Matt Amityj, semi-naked and balancing a champagne glass on his behind. Thankfully, instead, he argues that we should be making the internet worse, just like the real world.

Matt, you want to break the internet? Hey Rich, well, yeah, you know, because we've recalled these shows a little bit in advance, I was actually preparing this on the day that the US election results came in. So, you know, I was feeling very stressed out and not knowing which way the world is likely to turn. I thought it would be best to focus on a topic that was a bit more hopeful, no matter who won the election.

And the time that we're recording this, we still don't know who the winner is. So, you know, it feels a bit like living inside that movie Requiem for a Dream. It's surreal and awful at the same time, you know, a bit like eating bad cheese. But back to your question, now the idea of breaking the internet might not sound like a particularly hopeful mission, but the idea is to break it in order to fix it and then build it back better.

And that seems to be an ongoing theme in this pandemic stricken year. And with a little luck in the process of doing that, we can perhaps find a solution to some of the polarization that we're seeing online, because that polarization may not be being caused by digital technology, but it is certainly being amplified by it. And is this another one of your ideas like end sourcing? No, I mean, I'd like to take credit for it, but the credit rightly belongs to Eli Parrizar.

Now he's an activist, a social entrepreneur and an author. He's the co-founder of Upworthy, a social sharing site that prioritizes content that has a positive message. And I'm assuming that's not a place that you spend a lot of your time. Well, that is a good point.

So well made, sir. But no, you know, I'm actually trying to make a point of checking in with Upworthy more often. And though I'm saying that to you now, I haven't looked at the site today. But the guy, Eli Parrizar, he's also a co-founder, not a co-founder, a co-founder of Avaz, the online activist network, as well as being a board president of Progressive Public Policy Group, MoveOn.org.

And his 2011 bestseller, The Filter Bubble, what the internet is hiding from you coined the filter bubble term that's now the cipher for our online relationships and interactions. Although I guess we use echo chamber for much the same purpose now as well. So in other words, he's one of those people who seems incapable of doing anything mean and selfish, much like myself. He recently published a thought-provoking essay titled, To Men the Broken Internet, Create Online Parks on Wire.com.

And he uses it to analyze some of the problems we face with social spaces online and suggests some of the steps that we can take to fix them. So he's using the analogy of public parks to frame his argument? Yeah. So the central point to the argument is that in the real world, we have this sense of friction in the sense of social friction, because most of us occupy public spaces with strangers.

Now, that can be as simple as buying a coffee in the morning or standing next to people on public transport. We share space with colleagues in an office or even something like filling out forms in a government office. These aren't people that we are choosing to spend our time with. We don't necessarily know their backstory or their experiences, and we don't know their views or their motivations.

Which is where those layers of politeness and civility come from? Yeah, because we can't react like cavemen in every social interaction. If we did, there'd be a lot more bloodstained pavements. So saying, please and thank you, is a way to grease the wheels.

I'm one of the world's most horrible people, but a barista doesn't need to know that when I'm ordering a cup of tea. So we've developed these codes of behaviour to allow us to live on top of one another and create a world that we can all mostly coexist in. So where's the park idea coming? Well, that's the kind of interesting part.

Maybe it's not such a strong analogy for Malaysia, but it's this idea of parks being a microcosm of society. So Paris hails the neighbourhood public park as a space for citizen democracy. Some people want to go there and sit quietly and read, others maybe having a picnic around a boombox or more likely a Bluetooth speaker. There'll be kids and adults playing different games and sports.

Some people may be working out, other people are just going to be sitting or walking. You hear noise in all these different voices and languages, yet somehow parks have space for everything and everyone. People find their own space and by and large they do their own thing without getting irritated by the things that all the other people are doing. So it's not friction in the sense of aggression or antagonism, it's friction in the sense of collective and individual decisions being taken to give everybody their sense of space.

And do you think it's important that it's a public space? Yeah, very much so, because a lot of the supposedly public spaces we have actually aren't. They're private spaces which are controlled or they allow limited public access. So the public park movement actually came about as a result of private pleasure gardens.

If you had the money, you could go inside these private gardens, you could walk around, enjoy the trees and the flowers and whatever other entertainments were going on inside. I think they started to become more common during the Victorian era. And because they're owned, you lose that sense of shared ownership and the citizens actually deciding what the park is for. So we've been through 100 years or so of towns and cities building public parks for the people, spaces for ordinary people to come and spend their leisure time.

Now I lived in London for a few years before I came to Malaysia. And those public parks were really important, especially on the three days of the year that the British call summer. And you'd see, you know, you'd see absolutely everyone in those parks, you'd see people who are rich, people who are poor, you'd see the homeless. But now we see a lot more private developments that have a requirement to include outdoor recreation space.

But these are not publicly managed spaces. They're private spaces that the developer can still restrict access to. So far, this is sounded more like an episode of gardeners question time or something with Alan Tichmash, than Matt Slaind. Where's the technology angle to all of this?

I don't mind being likened to Alan Tichmash. That's absolutely fine. But yes, you know, that idea of private pleasure parks, they were actually the walled gardens of their era. And the social media spaces are the walled gardens of our age.

They're places that give the appearance of being public, but access to them is actually dictated by private companies. And that's where some of these bigger differences actually come in. In terms of speed and friction? Yeah.

So, you know, you'll often hear me on the show, railing against politicians and governments that are too slow to adapt to the pace of technology. But bureaucracies and policy making, those are often slow by necessity because it requires research, negotiation, discussion. Now, a lot of us are frustrated by how slow things like residents, committees or local councils are. But part of that process is negotiating those friction points.

It's looking for compromise, finding points that you can agree on and figuring out the best way to move forward. But the online world hasn't really evolved in that way. The motivation has always been that it should be fast, seamless, and the goal has always been to actually reduce friction. Through blitz scaling.

Well, certainly in part, you know, this idea that companies should grow as fast as possible, that they define a market or a niche and then they own it like Facebook and Twitter have done. Because despite their best efforts to diversify into each other's nook, both of those companies define their corners pretty well and they defend them pretty well. And one way to scale fast, of course, is by avoiding that friction. So, when you look at the comments you see on social media, you might think, well, actually, there's a lot of friction here.

But that really is more of an aggressive trait. It's tribalism, it's taking sides. Because those same platforms, and perhaps not intentionally, have made it very easy to search out and connect with people who share your point of view. And that reduces the overall sense of friction that you experience online.

So it's kind of like that idea of, quote, people like us. Well, yeah, for example, you know, the discussion about how to handle racism and sexism online, the platforms weren't designed to be accessible to people spouting hateful points of view. But they were predominantly designed and shaped by young white men. And young white men generally don't experience a lot of sexism or racism.

So when you apply that to the blitz scaling approach, suddenly you have platforms that are built without the ability to control those negative externalities for want of a better phrase. And as we know from the efforts to tame Reddit, it's much harder to retrofit those cures. So essentially those bubbles and echo chambers help the platforms to maintain their performance? Yes, because we find people who hopefully make us feel good about yourself.

Yes, because we find people who hopefully make us feel good about ourselves, whether you might be a social justice warrior or a white separatist. So the algorithms that run those platforms do the job that they were supposed to do, they give us content that we want to engage with and spend more time using the service. And that rarely means challenging us or our point of view. And that's a real shame because people generally aren't just one thing until those things are used to define them.

And this purpose then just reinforces those artificial definitions. So I chatted to Camarazlan and BFM's Heserall Ashraf about this on a recent bit of culture on BFM. And Heserall mentioned that he'd realized that he didn't often have discussions with people who had markedly different viewpoints from him. And I think that's very similar for a lot of people.

Obviously not for me because I disagree with most things and most people disagree with me. Yeah, how does this come back to public parts? Well, Periza's point is that this essentially fuels our intolerance and impatience because it reduces the amount of interactions that we have that include those opposing points of view. And just in general with people who are different from us.

So we don't have the patience to hear them out or engage with their point of view. The US election is the perfect example of that. You know, why should what party you support lead you to act with anger or violence? By and large governments change and life remains pretty much the same.

So the argument here is that it would be healthier to bring the sense of friction and citizen democracy at the park back to the places that we spend time in online. And when we come back, what a fixed back and better internet might look like, we're listening to Matt's Blaine here on BFM 8.9. Beyond frivolous matters, BFM 8.9. The Business Station.

BFM 8.9 at the Business Station. This is Matt's Blaine, of course. Now Matt, do you honestly think that most people will be up for the idea of making the internet worse? Well, I know it's an odd paradox that we should make the digital world worse in order to make it better.

You know, I do get that. But look how central the internet has become to our lives in 2020. We're struck down with this pandemic, so we've increasingly turned to the internet as a lifeline. The digital threads of that web have connected us to friends and family.

They've enabled us to work remotely, to educate our kids. If we have kids, delivered entertainment and allowed us to buy food and other necessities. Not to mention those same digital technologies are finding their way into the real world as well. Virtual and augmented reality services like Google's LiveView are blending the real world and the digital world.

They're adding content overlays that are supposed to tempt us to view the real world through a screen. And you worry that those layers could become another way to filter and avoid connecting with other people? Well, I guess in a sense, you know, one thing that LiveView can potentially do is flag where your friends and contacts are. Now on the surface, that's a great thing.

You can look at the camera on your phone and you can see physically where in the town or city your friends are located. But it might also reinforce the fact that the other people in the world are not your friends. So your end goal is always that reward reaching the end of the quest and that's where your friends are. So I'm not saying it will do that, but it could potentially gamify the way we see the world.

And then all of those people around you become, in the best case, obstacles that you have to negotiate in order to reach your journey's end. But in the worst case, they might become enemies in the same way that they are in a lot of kind of first person shooters. And you think the pandemic is increasing that sense of dislocation? Yes, because we're consciously seeking out places and behaviors that are safe.

You know, somebody you don't know is a potential infection risk. Look at the angry reactions to people who don't wear masks in public, because those people are a potential threat to your health. But more than that, we're reducing the amount of time that we spend outside of our homes and around other people. We're outside less and we're outside in smaller concentrations.

We actively stay away from crowds. And in a lot of places, you know, there are pandemic-related public ordinances and laws that actually prevent people from gathering in large groups. So we're losing that sense of how to be around other people. And instead, we're retreating to those friction-free relationships online.

So when we do come into contact with someone who isn't part of our network, we're kind of losing that ability to negotiate situations, maybe as calmly as we did before. And the answer to that is to establish a slow-moving committee to run the internet? Well, funding is a big component as well, and we'll get to that shortly. But yes, in the essay, the suggestion is that we change the way the internet is run.

So we talk about the democratizing power of the internet, but most of the places we visit actually belong to private companies. So when we talk about digital access and high-speed internet as being 21st century human rights, those assets are largely in private hands, from the ISPs to the services that we use on the web itself. All the people complaining about the censorship of this side or the other on Facebook and Twitter, you know, there is no right to free speech on those platforms. You have the right to say and think what you want, but you don't necessarily have the right to do that on their commercial platform.

So one of the first steps is to change the way we think these services. We think about these services. Yeah, we have to reshape our perceptions of them, I think. We have to stop thinking about Facebook and Twitter as being megaphones and start thinking about them as being more like a Starbucks.

Because that's essentially what it is. You're sitting in one of their chairs at one of their tables and you're enjoying a digital latte and you're paying for that with data and exposure to ads. And with that, you have to accept that you're subject to their rules while you're in their establishment. You can't just stand up and start shouting about how much you hate people who wear green lycra because you'll be asked to leave and banned from returning.

But the idea of them being publicly owned, doesn't that reinforce the idea that you can wander in and scream at anyone in green lycra? Well, again, you know, being online and companies like Facebook and Twitter, they've given us this idea that one space fits all. And maybe that's one of the reasons that the algorithms struggle so much. They're looking for similarities rather than our differences, I guess.

They're trying to fit billions of people into one box. They can change the parameters a little, but it's still essentially one container. So going back to the question, parks may be publicly owned, but they still have rules. It's just that by and large, we're the ones who determine the rules.

Now that might be done obliquely by voting for officials and having a hand in shaping what behaviors are and aren't considered acceptable in society. But the point is that the agenda isn't decided by a rent seeking company because that company's private motivation has to be its own financial health. Taking the park analogy a little further then, there are different parks for different people. Yeah, some parks are family friendly, some have an edgier, more adult feel, some are well kept, others are more run down, some are still semi-secret.

And you can even have all of those different spaces inside one megapark like New York Central Park. If you're lucky, you can choose the park that suits you. For me, St. James's Park was the nearest to where I lived, but I loved hide and green parks even in the winter.

We don't all have to be in the same space. And yes, the idea of public committees and negotiations to decide what things are sounds irritating, but the friction-free model has ironically left us angrier and not happier. Because in a friction-based model, we might find that irritation could actually create more happiness. I suppose one of the biggest issues here then is how would we make these changes?

Well, part of that might require reinventing the way the digital world is funded. Venture capital firms promote the idea of blitz scaling because it's one of the fastest ways for them to get a return on a promising investment. Now, Paris argues that we should have more public funding, which is something that I certainly support. Isn't there worry that governments might abuse that power?

Yeah, I mean, that is a valid concern, but having government involvement doesn't mean having centralized control. I know this sounds horrible, but maybe cities could be responsible for their own part of whatever version or versions of Facebook that we end up using. Maybe they could be held by public trusts. It doesn't have to be a binary central government versus private company outcome.

That kind of viewpoint is also part of the black and white position that we find ourselves in right now. It's another example of the polarization. We forget that many things exist on a scale, but instead we're just kind of focused on the extremities either end. But we also have to accept that some of these services are going to be hit and miss in the same way that some parks are great and some aren't.

People choose where they want to go. And there have been plenty of other Facebooks. It's just that we wanted Facebook more, so the alternatives have withered. But the point is that people get to choose.

And I think that's one thing we feel about the current social media companies, that everyone is on them. So we have no choice but to be on them too. A lot of my current conversations happen over WhatsApp. Not because I particularly want them to, but simply because people don't seem to want to message me on platforms like Telegram.

Right. So what are some of the other ownership structures? Paris puts the case for a similar intervention by philanthropists because that's how many of the original parks were founded. Rich people funded them and then deeded them to the public.

And you have your doubts? Well, it's possible that someone like Bill Gates could decide that he wants to support digital transparency and openness on that kind of scale. I do have doubts, possibly because so many of the potentially philanthropic super rich have made their money from some form of walled technology garden. So it's possible that they simply won't understand the need for it.

What I understand less is that they don't explore the model that we've talked about on the show so often, which is getting people to pay with money rather than data. For me, that would be the first step in changing that accountability structure. I'd like to see publicly funded open spaces, but I don't see any governments willing to go to that extreme as yet. So I think cash payments for the services would be a good first step, coupled with more government intervention to make sure that the rights of the users, which of course is us, are actually prioritized.

And I think that would give us a much truer reflection of which services we truly value. And I think that would also help us to determine what kinds of publicly funded digital spaces would be of most benefit to us. Now, if that means that some things have to get worse before they get better, then I think that that's a bit of friction that we could all do with. That was Matt's, Matt, explained if you missed any part of this show, don't forget you can download the podcast wherever you normally get it from.

And if you'd like transcripts of this show, you can head over to culturepop.com. This is Rich Renbree at 4 BFM 89.9 for the Business Station. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9 for the Business Station.