Zuck or Musk?

There are far more fundamental questions we're not asking

Zuck or Musk?

That’s a question several people have asked me recently. It’s a question lots of us have asked ourselves.

Will you use Threads, the new social media app created by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta?

Or stick with Twitter? (Now known as “X” courtesy of Elon Musk, Chief Flibbertigibbet of Twitter X.)

My answer — and I’m sure I share it with a great many people — is that I would very much like to have nothing whatsoever to do with Zuck, Musk, or other tech billionaires whose hubris exceeds their wealth.

But I have built a decent little network on Twitter — the devil will ice-fish before I call it “X” for any reason but derision — and dropping it would be a serious professional loss. So I haven’t. I can’t.

That’s “network effect” at work. Tech billionaires love network effect: Once they have you, they have you. Want to walk away because the new owner is behaving like a spoiled teenager on meth? Hah! No! You’ll put up with it. You have no choice because walking away means leaving your network and starting again with nothing.

Better still — better for billionaires, that is — network effect makes it extremely difficult for competitors to mount a serious challenge to incumbents even when the incumbents are despised by their customers. Only someone with a platform as big as Facebook’s, resources as bottomless as Meta’s, and a profile as big as Zuck’s, can hope to quickly build a platform big enough to threaten an incumbent as entrenched as Twitter — as the countless would-be Twitters not created by billionaires have amply demonstrated. And even those advantages may not be enough.

So we’re left with “Zuck or Musk?” Or giving up on collective conversation.

Does it have to be this way? Absolutely not.

The underlying technology of social media platforms is relatively simple. It could be configured a thousand different ways. And off the top of my head I can imagine a dozen starkly different organizational and funding models. Anyone can. And lots of people have developed this thinking into detailed plans. Some have implemented them. But they’re not multi-billionaires. Or even billionaires. And if you can’t scrounge up even a measly billion or two in today’s America — and today’s America is all that counts on Planet Tech — you are about as powerless as the host of a local PBS station begging for donations.

So we’re left with “Zuck or Musk?” Pick your poison.

And yet, however difficult it may be to build something new and different, we can at least talk about alternatives. Yet we’re not. In the broad public, there isn’t a serious conversation about replacing the status quo. Sometimes it seems that real, fundamentally different alternatives are almost literally unthinkable.

Consider that Elon Musk repeatedly called Twitter the “digital town square,” which is a pretty good description of the platform and its role in society. But one would think that should raise questions.

Here’s one: “Why would we allow any corporation or individual to own the town square and run it for their profit?” Here’s another: “If this space really does perform an important role in our democratic life, shouldn’t it be controlled, in some fashion, by our elected representatives — that’s government — and designed and operated with the flourishing of democratic life being its top, or even sole, priority?”

Or to put that a little more bluntly: “Why would we allow the town square to be the personal plaything of an obscenely rich and increasingly impulsive man who seems hell-bent on demonstrating the wisdom of the ancient Greeks’ warnings about hubris and madness? We need the town square. Why don’t we tell him to go build a lair under a volcano?”

To be clear, these are, to me, genuine questions. All the many models I can imagine for social media strike me as flawed one way or another. Maybe “Zuck or Musk?” really is the least-bad option. I’d love to hear that thrashed out in vigorous, widespread, public debate.

But there is no such debate.

Why is that? There is vast discontent. Why isn’t there a discussion of alternatives as big and widespread as the discontent?

Here’s where I get to plug Power and Progress by the economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.

It’s a long attack on the idea that technological progress inevitably delivers progress for people. Nothing is inevitable, Acemoglu and Johnson argue. Our choices — individually and collectively — shape the particular form technology takes. Choose wisely and technology can indeed deliver tremendous human progress. Choose poorly — by, say, allowing self-interested, megalomaniacal tycoons to set the agenda and push decisions in their preferred directions — and the benefits of the new technology will tend to accumulate in the hands of the said tycoons. Leaving others with little or nothing.

I could not agree more strongly with Acemoglu and Johnson’s thesis. In fact, it’s a foundational idea in the social history of technology I am now writing.

A central problem, as Acemoglu and Johnson argue, is that the decisions that shape technology are themselves shaped by discussions that do not occur in neutral forums where all have equal voice. They take place in forums — like Twitter — owned by the tycoons. Or funded by the tycoons. Or dominated by sophisticated players like politicians and lobbyists and think-tanks beholden to the tycoons. And even where the tycoons’ money doesn’t translate directly into power, they still have enormous advantages: If Mark Zuckerberg orders his PR team to write an op-Ed and get it published under his name in The New York Times, you should bet your house and life savings that The Times will publish it tout de suite. Contrast that with the ordinary citizen, who, even if he writes like Shakespeare and reasons like Bertrand Russell, has a better chance of landing a private audience with the Pope than publishing an op-Ed in The New York Times.

That doesn’t mean tycoons control what we think and say. But it does mean they have a powerful grip on the agenda — what we think and talk about. And as Acemoglu and Johnson rightly note, the power to set agendas is the most potent way to direct debates. And shape decisions.

Way back in the Clinton administration, I had an experience that opened my eyes to the power of agenda-setting.

In the late 1990s, I was researching illicit drug policy and the Clinton administration was cooking up something called “Plan Colombia.” It was basically a big push to drive down the production of cocaine in Colombia, the principal source country. It would involve major boosts in funding and training for the military and the police, heightened interdiction, a giant increase in aerial spraying and other forms of crop eradication, and payments to farmers to grow other crops.

What struck me at the time is that Plan Colombia looked an awful lot like the “Andean Initiative” launched by Clinton’s predecessor, George H. W. Bush. That program also had a huge budget but it succeeded only in pushing cocaine production from one region to another, one country to another, thus spreading the corruption, violence, and misery associated with the illicit trade. Overall cocaine production went up and up and up. So how would Plan Colombia be anything but a reboot of the expensive and destructive Andean Initiative?

Politicians weren’t asking that question. Or any questions. Neither were the news media.

In Washington, I found that very few officials who weren’t directly involved in Plan Colombia had even heard of it. And Bush’s Andean Initiative — not even a decade old — was long-forgotten history.

The White House’s policy wasn’t on the agenda. In the slightest. But then White House officials decided it served their interests for that to change.

So Bill Clinton flew to Cartagena, gave a brief and banal speech about Plan Colombia, and flew back home. Clinton was only in Colombia for a few hours and he said little, but his visit was transformative: The news media flooded with stories about Plan Colombia and the political class talked about nothing but. For a week or two. Then, with no further prompts forthcoming from the White House, the issue faded. Like someone turning a faucet to let the water flow, then turning it back to stop it, the Clinton administration had easily and effectively turned the conversation on and off.

And notice that the Clinton administration hadn’t merely controlled what we were talking about — cocaine production in South America. They also controlled how we talked about it — the options under discussion. The administration talked exclusively about stamping out drug supply, so that’s what every media report, and every politician’s comment, focussed on exclusively. Is aerial spraying effective? Paying farmers? Interdiction? Some other combination of policies? More fundamental questions were never mentioned. (“We’ve been at this an awful long time and supply only increases. Is it even possible to stamp out supply when there’s strong demand?”) And of course all the vast array of fundamentally different policy approaches — including legalization and regulation — were never raised. Which is just the way the Clinton administration wanted it.

That’s when I understood that, in a liberal democracy, the power to directly influence what we think and say is tenuous at best. It takes work. And money. But the power to set the agenda — shaping what we will think and talk about — is far more potent. Cheaper, too.

If Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg wanted people to consider some radical new model for social media — say, a Wikipedia-like social media platform run by a non-profit foundation that doesn’t accept ads and doesn’t treat people’s communications as data to be harvested and sold — you can be sure we would be talking about it. But that’s the last thing they want people to talk about, so we’ll never hear such crazy ideas from them.

Including Zuck and Musk, Forbes says there are 735 billionaires in the United States (collective net worth: $4.5 trillion.) If a few of those 735 billionaires became passionate about this issue, they could probably get it on America’s agenda. So could the president. Senators, too, maybe, with a little luck.

But in a country where even the most powerful elected officials are constantly on the hunt for the ever-growing gobs of cash needed to stay in office, public officials willing to anger billionaires are rare. And public officials willing to anger billionaires without having the backing of other billionaires are rarer still.

If you want to get something on America’s agenda today, the question you have to answer is, “who’s your billionaire?”

But billionaires aren’t the only reason the status quo has such a tight grip on our imaginations and conversations.

Status quo bias is core human psychology. What exists tends to feel both inevitable and right. The further a proposal for change deviates from the status quo, the more strange and unsettling it feels. Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in human affairs.

That’s how we get to this: “Of course the Internet is dominated by private companies generating profits from advertising and data harvesting. Of course those companies prioritize engagement over everything else, even the psychological health of young people and the political health of liberal democracy. That was always going to happen. It was inevitable. Anyway, it may not be perfect but it’s for the best. Check out the cool new filter on Instagram!”

Even for those on Forbes’ list of billionaires, getting a genuine alternative to any status quo on the agenda for discussion is a tall order. For those not on the list, trying to get serious consideration of alternatives that threaten to take money and power from some billionaires while promising no rewards to other billionaires is …. Well. In today’s America, you are — to quote my dear old dad — pissing into the wind.

There are, however, rare moments when our collective imagination is pried open.

Disasters are good for that. The First World War really shook things up. So did the Great Depression.

The Trump administration wasn’t quite on that scale — quite — but it gave us a good shake. For a time, it appeared that revelations about Facebook’s abominable behaviour — including its role in polarizing and radicalizing the American public — might revive a little of the old trust-busting spirit of the Teddy Roosevelt era. But that fever passed. Zoom recently changed its terms of service so that everything you say or do on the platform — your face, your words, everything — becomes the company’s property. It can use that to train AI. Or sell it to other companies. The brazenness of this move strongly suggests Big Tech isn’t worried that the peasants might finally pick up pitchforks.

Another opportunity for discussion of fundamentals comes with new technology.

When radio broadcasting exploded in the early 1920s, it caught essentially everyone by surprise. What should be broadcast? By whom? How should broadcasting be regulated? How was broadcasting to be paid for? All questions were wide open. We had no choice but to discuss fundamentals and consider the extremely broad range of possibilities. (The history of that brief period is fascinating but, alas, I have to save it for my book. Until some billionaire decides to bankroll my writing, I have to eke out a living in this most precarious of trades.)

Out of these discussions came decisions. Legislation was passed in 1927 and 1934.

But when television came into its own after the Second World War, there wasn’t anything like that open-minded popular discussion. Television broadcasting looked like radio broadcasting with pictures. So the model developed for radio was extended to television with relatively little debate.

There’s a modern parallel: When the Internet exploded in the 1990s, it blew all our minds. It was unlike anything seen before and many visionaries promoted crazy ideas like those that created Wikipedia. But the broadcast model was too firmly rooted in American minds. Of course private companies should control this amazing new thing. Of course they it should be run for profit. Of course advertising should be its lifeblood.

When social media came along a decade and a half later, there was much less consideration of the array of possible models it could take. Like television following radio, social media was consigned to the attention-economy status quo. The only question was which founders would become billionaires.

If this analysis is right, there are two big, tragic stories here.

The first involved radio. As I’ll show in my book, despite the promise of the wide-open discussion that launched the medium, corporate executives and government officials stumbled about, making ad hoc decisions that led ultimately to a conclusion that almost no one thought desirable at the outset. That’s the first tragedy. It created the standard model for radio broadcasting. Which became the standard model for TV. Which had way too much influence when the dazzling new technology of the Internet came along in the Clinton era. That’s the second tragedy: We could have taken digital technologies in very different, far healthier directions. We didn’t.

So now we’re stuck with Zuck and Musk.

Artificial intelligence could be the dramatic new technology that blows open the status quo and compels us to have a fundamental discussion about what we want technology to deliver and what models of control and regulation can best deliver it. But there’s no sign of that happening. Remember that, ChatGPT aside, the techniques that spawned this latest explosion of AI days back to 2012, so while awareness of the AI explosion is new, the explosion itself is not. Corporations have for many years been busily developing the technology in ways that suit their interests best, and releasing it into the world in ways that, again, serve their interests best, without any serious discussion. Finally, now, we’re talking AI safety. But there is previous little evidence that of a widespread, serious discussion at a fundamental level — starting with questions like “what do we want this technology to do for our societies?” and “how can we best achieve that?” Instead, we are, as usual, proceeding on the basis of an agenda that looks an awful lot like it was written by Microsoft, Google, Meta, and the rest. You can be sure that agenda serves the interests of the billionaires. But the rest of us?

Far from a rupture that triggers serious thought, AI is more likely to be smoothly absorbed by existing institutions and interests — the status quo — adding zeroes to billionaires’ bank accounts, worsening inequality, undermining the common interest, and doing god knows what damage.

And in hindsight, we will talk about it as if it were all an inevitable consequence of the technology itself. While Zuck and Musk smile and nod.

A little digestif

That was grim. Sorry. So before you go, here’s a little item to lighten the mood.

It’s one of the funniest obituaries I’ve ever read. And that’s a stiff competition. (HIYO!)

The New York Times, September 13, 1963

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Dr. Wingate M. Johnson, editor of the North Carolina Medical Journal since 1940, died yesterday. He was 78 years old.

For those unfamiliar with North Carolina, it’s the homeland of Big Tobacco. Joe Camel and the Marlborough Man were born in Winston-Salem. So was Dr. Wingate M. Johnson. And by an amazing coincidence, the good doctor had views on smoking that, in the dry delivery of The Times, “differed from much medical opinion today.”

After studying 150 inveterate smokers and 150 nonsmokers [in 1929], he denied that smoking increased blood pressure, had a dire effect on pregnant women, caused nervousness, led to tuberculosis or was a major factor in causing angina pectoris.

But the good doctor was very concerned with the toll taken by another modern habit.

In 1948, Dr, Johnson sounded the warning against too much exercise for persons over 40.

He said: “During the First World War, Walter Camp, Yale’s most famous athlete, boasted that he kept the members of Woodrow Wilson’s Cabinet in prime condition by his famous ‘daily dozen’ exercises.”

“The only member of the Cabinet who declined to take the daily drill was Josephus Daniels, who recently died just short of his 86th birthday — having outlived all other members of the Cabinet, and having been active and useful until his last brief illness.”

“Walter Camp himself failed by several years to reach the Psalmist’s limit [age 70].”

“Senator Chauncey M. Depew, who lacked 18 days of living to 94, was quoted as saying that he got his exercise by acting as pallbearer for his friends who took exercise.”

So smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. But avoid exercise. That stuff will kill you.

You can’t argue with science.