Erin Kissane 0:01 I'm just going to say that because this is the kind of conference that it is, with many streams of information and in some cases multiple sources of truth, you may have seen that the title of my talk is Landslide. 0:18 You may also have seen the title of my talk is Hold Fast. 0:21 Both things are true at the same time because I gave Ted the information at different times. 0:25 So we're doing Landslide Holdfast. 0:31 Oop. 0:35 One more glitch. 0:37 So hi, I'm Erin. 0:39 I alternate between trying to figure out what the social internet is doing to us and trying to use it to get better information to more people in more places. 0:48 So right now— I'm doing network thinking and projects at my mini studio, Wreckage Salvage, and also co-running a networked volunteer mutual aid information project at Unbreaking, also a project of the Raft Foundation. 1:02 Raft Foundation. 1:05 And we work to nail down knowledge about what our government is doing to us in the United States. 1:10 Before that, I co-founded the COVID tracking project at The Atlantic. 1:14 This was before The Atlantic did what it did. 1:21 That was to help people understand what was happening in 2020 through public data. 1:25 And before that, I was at a journalism tech community that came out of the Moz Foundation. 1:31 And before that, I was all over the early web. 1:35 So that's the nature of my work. 1:36 I use the tools and I try to improve the tools and then I repeat. 1:39 And what I learned from yesterday's amazing pre-conference experience is that many of you are in much the same position, which I love. 1:48 It's like a whole room of corner cases. 1:50 My favorite. 1:52 So I want to know what the networks are doing to us and what resources the people like us have to draw from to shape our networks in ways that ground and reorient our communities in useful knowledge. 2:06 And, you know, to maybe someday live together in peace and mutual respect. 2:12 So right before the end of last year, I posted another extremely long blog post, which is my jam. 2:18 Called Landslide: A Ghost Story, in which I tried to get closer to the core of our network's role in disorienting and disintegrating us. 2:27 And I'll talk about that one a little bit here because the new work I'm bringing builds on it. 2:32 But this talk, I think, and I hope, is kind of a turning point for my work and what I can bring to you because I think I finally have a good enough handle on at least parts of this to be able to offer some paths forward that aren't either unattainable or just like disproportionately paltry. 2:49 And I want to make a side note. 2:51 I take it as a given that one major underlying problem that prevents us from dealing with many other problems is centralization and lock-in, which decentralized networks are here to deal with. 3:01 And I just want to say I think that Jay and the rest of Bluesky's founding team have done us all a tremendous service by, yes, making Bluesky the app, but especially in using all of that available momentum to get this protocol ecosystem off the ground and stable enough to support the kind of independent development that I saw happening yesterday and we'll be talking about here. 3:22 So I assume basically universal concordance about this. 3:25 I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about it, but I am so grateful for the work that the team has accomplished. 3:30 I just wanna say that. 3:33 So there's so much good stuff happening around the protocol and I'm super psyched to see the next batch of it today. 3:39 Yesterday was incredible. 3:40 The work I have been doing is for for you, and I brought a lot of things. 3:44 So let's get to it. 3:48 62 years ago yesterday on Good Friday in 1964, a tectonic plate up under Alaska slid under another tectonic plate and produced an extraordinarily strong and sustained earthquake that we now know to be the second highest magnitude quake in recorded history. 4:07 It actually reshaped the field of seismology. 4:10 But more immediately, it caused parts of the Alaskan coast to drop by nearly 40 feet— rise by nearly 40 feet, dropped others down below sea level, triggered enormous tsunamis. 4:20 And according to geologists, it was so big that it rang the planet like a bell. 4:26 Alaska is not densely populated, but this is what the earthquake looked like in— this is in Anchorage. 4:33 In cities and towns, you see You see the kind of damage you'd expect. 4:36 It tore up streets and knocked down buildings. 4:39 And in Alaska, 139 people died. 4:43 It also did something exceptionally weird and horrific in the port town of Valdez. 4:51 Valdez is the northernmost year-round ice-free deepwater port in North America, and the southern end of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline. 5:04 My partner grew up in Valdez, so I heard about the earthquake and how weird it had been from him. 5:10 And my father-in-law worked at the Valdez Museum and had produced a video from some of this really wild, grainy, contemporary footage of the quake. 5:18 So when we went up to visit, I got to see that. 5:20 And then much later, my family moved to the Cascadia subduction zone. 5:24 Woo-hoo! 5:25 And I became an earthquake nerd, as one does. 5:30 And like I sort of just poked at this story and the records out of Valdez as part of my like insomnia rounds of upsetting things to look at in the middle of the night. 5:40 But it kind of stayed in the background until the end of last year when I discovered that the US Geological Survey had produced a new cut of that weird film footage from the Valdez Harbor. 5:52 And I'm not going to show it to you, but it is in the Landslide post on my site. 5:59 The footage only existed because a supply ship, the SS China, had come into the harbor right before the quake, and someone on the ship happened to have an 8mm camera and happened to be filming the crew just like dorking around on deck and throwing oranges and candy to the kids who'd come down to the dock to meet the ship. 6:17 But I'd only ever seen the footage in a form that turned out to be highly manipulated, and the reconstructed cut from USGS revealed that the shots we always thought were of the water of the local tsunami produced by the quake were actually of the land, which had just turned to liquid and flowed out from under everything it was supporting. 6:42 And that's what used to be the harbor, and it all just fell in the sea. 6:50 And the footage actually shows it just like pouring out from under these buildings. 6:54 That resequenced footage remains the single most upsetting piece of film I have ever seen because the destabilization it depicts is happening at the level of basic physics, which is gross and weird. 7:08 So here's what happened in Valdez based on everything we know now. 7:12 The town was built on glacial moraine, which is this disorganized debris piled up by a glacier. 7:18 And down near the shoreline, that jumble of like unconsolidated rock and sand went down 600 feet. 7:25 Before you hit bedrock. 7:27 And building on the moraine was not like an obviously bad idea because it was still solid ground. 7:31 You could step on it or drive on it and it's fine because the contact forces between the particles would distribute the load. 7:38 But Valdez is also extremely wet. 7:41 In the winter, it snows so much people have to shovel their roofs to keep them from collapsing. 7:45 And the water table down there by the shoreline is just a few feet from the surface of the town. 7:51 So in late March of 1964, between that just like barely subterranean water and the melt from these exceptionally heavy snows, that loose jumbled substrate was flooded, was completely saturated. 8:07 And it turns out that when series of extraordinarily heavy and repeated shocks like this particular earthquake hit a loose substrate that's also completely saturated with water, the compression hits the water and pushes all those particles apart, and the solids just turn into liquid almost instantly and flow away, and everything falls in. 8:30 And in Valdez, the whole harbor flowed away and took out everything and everyone on it. 8:36 So this is the 3-part model of how this particularly horrific thing works. 8:42 We've seen this elsewhere now, but we never had— especially we never had footage. 8:48 Of anything like this. 8:49 There were like some very loose records of what's called soil liquefaction. 8:55 Don't recommend that you go look for videos of soil liquefaction. 8:59 I was down this rabbit hole in December, the same time I was trying to take stock of almost a year of work at Unbreaking, where we're just kind of down slogging through the mud of our information landscape. 9:09 And I was trying to understand like the networks piece and also the underlying like journalism-shaped stuff that's supposed to produce distributable knowledge. 9:17 And how our collective understanding was faring against repeated and violent shocks. 9:24 So I wrote a lot of words about the information substrate and the saturation and flooding of network-based overload and how those two things together produce a colossal vulnerability to shocks. 9:35 And I'm gonna lay those out super quickly here just to get them on the table so we can move on to the good stuff. 9:43 Starting with the substrate, in the US, where I'm from, and in many other parts of the world, our underlying foundational knowledge systems have taken a lot of damage. 9:52 Like the business model underlying our media continues down this decades-long death spiral. 9:58 And media consolidation, which preceded the damage wrought by the internet by many decades, continues to degrade and squeeze and hollow out a lot of our most, well, formerly most trustworthy sources. 10:11 Of current information and basic analysis. 10:13 But it's not just journalism. 10:15 Extractive practices at every part of the knowledge production chain has dealt tremendous damage to our whole ecosystem. 10:23 I have on my hard drive enough for like a dozen talks about what's happened to basic research and peer review and academic presses and general presses and even like web search, the niches that used to support independent writers and artists and some of our most recent knowledge consolidating institutions like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are beginning to suffer. 10:44 And all of this hollowing out has been accompanied by an upwelling of things that we wouldn't traditionally call news that range from genuinely vital eyewitness videos to outright and well-funded propaganda farms to purely fact-free slop. 11:02 And all of this is enmeshed with the news organizations primarily devoted to discrediting real reporting and presented through social platforms that in many cases deliberately shape the subset of available information to evade responsibility for misinformation and also to suit sort of our own worst selves' desires. 11:25 So this is not great. 11:28 And then we also have just the massive proliferation of information that I feel like we've just about lost a way to talk about, maybe because we're so buried in it. 11:38 The science folks bring it up, and that was extremely heartening to hear them acknowledging. 11:43 That's what they do, the knowledge crafting. 11:45 But this phenomenon of exponential hyperproliferation and information overload is a real one with a large and solid body of evidence about its genuinely damaging psychological and emotional and physical effects. 12:00 And we've been making filters and developing practices to cope with this, with too much information, since we invented writing and complaining about it the whole time. 12:11 The history of information overload is amazing. 12:15 But our latest filters, including web search and social media algorithms and now the LLMs, are not necessarily filtering our flood in ways that actually serve us well. 12:28 And many of us too have lost faith in some of the sort of stolid older filters because we can see that they're not representing the reality that we find in eyewitness videos and first-person accounts. 12:40 So maybe we decide to let go of those filters too. 12:43 And the more filters we opt out of, the more we expose ourselves to the flood. 12:48 But at least when we do that, we're getting access to more knowledge, right? 12:54 So this is a question social scientists have spent a lot of time and funding trying to figure out. 13:00 And the emerging consensus is that for most people, most of the time, keeping up with current events via our social feeds produces something very near to zero gains in our knowledge about civics and politics. 13:15 We see a lot of things go by and we feel a lot of feelings about them, but by and large we are not actually building much knowledge in our human brains. 13:24 But I feel kind of cautious about this research because it blends together a lot of different ways to use social media. 13:30 And I think those of us in this room are probably outliers in how we use it. 13:36 And in most cases, like news, you know, the researchers are just talking about a specific thing, which is news to link story— links to news stories being passed around and not, you know, like mega threads of analysis or videos by particularly gifted explainers. 13:51 But even with those caveats, the numbers are not good. 13:54 There's a very recent and thorough meta-analysis on whether we gain political or civic knowledge from social media exposure that has persuasive results that on the whole, we really just don't. 14:08 Which doesn't mean that outliers don't exist, but it does mean unless we're only building for outliers, we should recognize that the combination of social media and human brains does not on average produce workable knowledge about what's happening. 14:23 So that's bad, but there's worse. 14:27 We also have pretty solid, although somewhat less evidenced research that on the whole, we don't just fail to learn things from our social feeds. 14:38 We also come away from them feeling more confident in our knowledge that we don't have. 14:45 Which is also closely connected to my all-time least favorite research on cognition, which is on the illusion of explanatory depth. 14:54 Who knows about the illusion of explanatory depth? 14:58 Oh, great. 14:59 Okay. 14:59 We'll get to that later. 15:01 For now, I want to underline that not knowing things we might need to know is bad, but lacking the epistemic humility to know that we might need to go learn them is probably worse. 15:17 And then there's the emotional dimension of the flood. 15:20 Keep hitting the mic, sorry. 15:23 Which I wanna talk about in strictly human terms and without laundering it through social science. 15:29 Which is not to pick on the highbrow moral panic about the internet folks, although it is. 15:37 But I think many of our dominant critical lenses on our networks and what they do to society are essentially laundering genuine affective feelings trouble through selective and often irresponsibly represented social science and neurological research to present themselves as unshakably authoritative policy prescriptions. 15:57 And I took the anxious generation slide out of this talk, but please know that it was there. 16:04 There are responsible ways to work with the science. 16:07 And I try to be really cautious when I, an epistemic trespasser, do it. 16:12 But we don't even need it for conversations among ourselves because the affective stuff is real. 16:18 And we experience countless ephemeral sort of news-shaped bids for our attention every day. 16:24 And most of us who hang out online experience them through highly emotive feeds that lean toward volume and speed and never-ending context collapse. 16:32 So for a lot of us, it just feels bad. 16:36 And this is the saturating flood. 16:39 And then we get the shocks. 16:41 And in the Landslide essay, I focused pretty narrowly on the Trump regime's attack on the idea of truth and on every viable model of building knowledge. 16:52 But the more important attack from the administration is that they are just doing deranged, nonsensical bullshit all the time. 17:07 Thank you. 17:09 And what that does to our ability to understand the world is still not as bad as what they are actually doing to people and to economies and to countries and to sovereignties. 17:20 But it's still very bad because the only way out of this, barring international intervention, is for Americans to pull our brains together and act. 17:31 And I don't know what your personal networks look like, but a lot of people in almost every part of mine, in all my overlapping circles, spent a lot of the last year in a state of real disorientation about things like, how is this not breaking the law? 17:45 And what is the law even? 17:49 And this was true for almost everyone except for the folks who knew in advance that they would be targeted and were paying a different kind of attention. 17:57 But also, unfortunately, one bad regime is not the only kind of shock that we're experiencing or will experience. 18:05 So I've spent the last few months reading more deeply in the research and also continuing to plug away in the info mines at Unbreaking and bashing on some possibilities for building ourselves out of this mess, which is what I want to talk about next. 18:21 But first, I want to briefly say why I think this work belongs here at this protocol conference more than just about anywhere else. 18:32 When I write about the fallout of our global networks, some of the points I come to echo ones that many much fancier critics have covered. 18:41 But I tend to reach different conclusions than they do because I am focused on builders, and they are mostly writing toward individualistic remedies or toward regulation. 18:51 And I have been alive for a lot of the internet so far, and I have absolutely no faith in either of those pathways at this time. 18:59 We are not going to disconnect from each other. 19:02 It's just not going to happen. 19:04 And our regulators are mostly, speaking for my own country, working from cartoon understandings of network mechanisms and skating to where the puck was, like, between 2 and 12 years ago. 19:17 Which leaves us, the people in this room, and people like us who hold the technological means of production and would like to use it to do something different. 19:26 And I will be honest, like, saying this kind of thing, which I have been saying in a lot of places for a long time, has felt like kicking people who were already down because they're under-resourced and overtaxed open source developers, or they're stuck inside corporations with their own perverse incentives, or they're people who have a lot of really good ideas but haven't had the technical means to turn those into something they can show other people. 19:52 But there are two things happening right now that maybe make this moment different for some of us. 19:57 And the first is that decentralized protocols are a live force now with a bigger user base and more attention than we have ever seen. 20:05 The atmosphere is a dev-friendly, pro-experimentation zone with so much room for trying things. 20:13 The second factor is that writing code has always been difficult and time-consuming and therefore quite expensive along one axis or another. 20:21 And that appears to be changing quite quickly, which can go several ways and will. 20:29 But the models and the generators seem to be making a lot of previously high learning curve, high time commitment prototyping and experimentation vastly easier to get into. 20:40 And when I wrote this, I felt like that was still sort of speculative. 20:44 And then we moved closer to the conference and I was like, oh, it's really happening. 20:48 I got here and I was like, oh, okay. 20:52 And this gives people who have been thinking hard about the effects our networks, the effects of our networks, a chance to kind of rotate in and start prototyping and building. 21:02 And it also, I think, gives longtime developers more time and freedom to put into stuff that's actually good for us as organisms and communities of organisms. 21:14 Therefore, I want to bring you some research threads in hopes and provocations, which we will mostly adapt from the wonderful world of kelp. 21:29 I need to turn your attention to macroalgae, or macroalgae for the Brits in the audience, specifically to kelp and specifically to the subtlest and least showy parts of kelp, which are its holdfasts. 21:46 Holdfasts, and thank you to my daughter, Junah, for this illustration. 21:59 Holdfasts are the structural support systems that kelp and other microalgae and also a bunch of little sessile, which is a beautiful word for non-mobile sea creatures, evolved to cling on to the sea floor or even to like bigger shellfish, with such strength that they can hold on and flourish in deep water and in the roughest, most turbulent intertidal zones. 22:22 And the reason, by the way, that I tend to pull so heavily from the natural world and our interactions with it is that the world has kind of figured a lot of shit out in a lot of ways. 22:32 And I think leaving all of those models of complexity on the table is goofy. 22:37 And also kelp is awesome. 22:40 So kelp and its holdfast do 3 things that I think could be very useful for us to think about. 22:47 They anchor entire communities into stability, and they create permeable respite and sturdy shelter for all kinds of weirdos, both first up in their fronds and down at the interface between the bedrock and the sea. 23:03 So the first thing I want to bring is the idea of anchoring networks and humans. 23:08 I think we could work toward reciprocal integration of rich sources of human knowledge. 23:15 You know, we know that news organizations have tried to adapt to the distribution changes that our networks have forced on them, but the network's needs and affordances keep shifting. 23:25 So like getting good at SEO worked for a while with constant recalibration, and then AI summaries have just cratered that experience for news orgs. 23:34 Which is going to shut down newsrooms and already is. 23:39 Getting integrated into social platforms worked pretty well until Meta's properties started deprioritizing news, and Twitter turned into X and started hiding links. 23:48 And I know that folks here today are psyched about getting journalists and news orgs onto the protocol, but we're going to have to make it worth their while and demonstrate that there's a long game here that's going to be beneficial to them rather than a short period of reciprocity followed by a shift to either extraction or exclusion. 24:08 And part of that is gonna be based on whether or not people in the protocol are actually engaging with news and knowledge. 24:14 As I suspect, although I have no data for this, is higher on Blue Sky and various other skies than on other platforms. 24:25 And also, we need to tell whether people in the protocol or encourage people in the protocol are engaging with that rather than treating links and headlines like trading cards to signal membership or confirm the truth of our already stated positions. 24:42 So this is a long way to say we should try to get people to actually read what they're sharing. 24:50 And the current state there is not great. 24:54 Nature analysis of of 35 billion Facebook posts, I know it's Facebook, but that had links, showed that 3/4 of the time people shared links, they hadn't clicked through, let alone read the article they were sharing. 25:10 And the presence of sharing cues, just the existence of a cue, might you wanna share this, also makes people measurably worse at discerning true things from false things. 25:23 Or as the researchers put it, the social media context interferes with truth discernment. 25:29 So social media encounters, as we see them on the big centralized platforms, seem to push interactions with news not just from knowing things to knowing kind of about things, but from knowing about things to signaling that we might know about them, which is getting really far away from the knowledge itself. 25:49 Which, I mean, I've been on the internet, that tracks, but if we wanted to move toward better integration and more reciprocity with knowledge-collecting institutions, because if no one's clicking, it's not helping them, what would we do? 26:04 So for Blue Sky and Black Sky and North Sky and probably various other skies, y'all are already ahead by not doing things that are actively hostile to knowledge, like hiding links and deprioritizing news and announcements. 26:21 Analysis. 26:22 There's probably also room to think about some remediation. 26:26 I will start here with my least favorite intervention, which is the nudge. 26:32 The nudge to read before sharing. 26:34 I find this highly annoying. 26:37 But I think it's interesting that it does seem to change behavior, at least in the short term. 26:42 Twitter's comms team claimed in 2020 that when they did a little— want to read this? 26:46 Before retweeting it, nudge, they got a 40% boost in article opening. 26:51 We don't know what went into people's brains, but we know that happened. 26:53 That's not nothing. 26:55 And as skeptical as I am about nudges, all friction is perhaps not terrible. 27:00 There's a study from just this past winter that looked quite carefully at friction, the nudge, and found that a very, very light touch of friction, so just a very occasional intervention, plus a tiny quiz really improved information quality by like a third. 27:19 Just doing the friction made people stop sharing things as much. 27:24 It didn't improve the quality of the knowledge on the network. 27:27 But the share friction plus a little bit of engaging analytical thought actually increased the quality according to the study's measures by about a third, which is so much. 27:38 But I should say the caveat is that this study was done using a simulation. 27:43 So it's kind of like reading the headline that's like, scientists cure cancer in mice. 27:50 But even as with the mouse effect, right, like they're interesting mice. 27:55 So adding friction is never going to fully reverse the directional movement of a system that leans toward virality and towards first mover advantage and towards signaling versus understanding. 28:08 So what would it look like to move that problem upstream? 28:13 What would a system look like that actually centrally attended to community knowledge and reciprocity? 28:19 What would it do when a user in such a system encountered something that appears to be, for instance, news or analysis? 28:28 Maybe it would open an article or the video or whatever and suggest finding a good clip or a quote to share, which could improve the quality of shared information and perhaps get more of it into the sharers' brains. 28:39 Maybe it would automatically add sources mentioned in posts that people bookmark or fave to a reading or watch list that they can return to to help fight the anxiety-producing ephemerality that keeps information seekers doom-scrolling. 28:54 Maybe it could offer a tiny, even machine-generated summary and some context cues about the source that provide enough trust signal from people with broadly strong reputations for a given local cluster to pull attention away from worthless content farms and misinfo peddlers and toward journalists and creators with integrity. 29:14 Or maybe, God help us, it would ask us to answer a question about the material in the article, which I actually, I've flipped. 29:21 Like, I'd love that. 29:22 I'm fully ready to leaderboard knowledge as a countermeasure to the current mode of leaderboarding the lowest common denominator. 29:30 Like, let's go. 29:32 But the right move obviously depends on a specific project's values and goals. 29:37 But I think this is the right level to consider it back in the architecture of a social internet system rather than as, like, aftermarket fixes. 29:45 And having seen yesterday's science track, like, those folks are way ahead of everyone else on this. 29:53 So good. 29:58 So next cool kelp fact. 30:02 Kelp makes slower, calmer zones. 30:08 For us, I think we could make slower, calmer zones that help our people, keep them from being overwhelmed by network tides. 30:19 And there are two ways to look at this. 30:21 First, I wanna say, like, Kelp forests are super biodiverse. 30:25 They're a very rich community. 30:27 They're up there with coral reefs on the biodiversity and what we call productivity as a system. 30:36 And they do two things roughly that help them be such an important sheltering force. 30:43 The first is up in the water column where the kelp fronds and blades calm and slow and deflect the very strong currents that surround kelp forests, creating calmer and less turbulent spaces where other organisms can thrive. 30:59 The second is down in the holdfasts themselves. 31:02 The structures that wrap around and latch onto the sturdiest anchor they can are actually the most thriving part of the community. 31:10 They shelter hundreds of mobile and sessile invertebrate species. 31:15 They're like the critical infrastructure for kelp busy town. 31:18 I want to take these one at a time. 31:21 First up in the water column where the tides are moving fast, but perhaps our network affordances could provide a little bit of cognitive and emotional traffic calming. 31:34 So something I've been watching for a long time and especially this year is that every time something happens, whether it's someone dropping an album or a natural disaster happening or ice someone in my country, there is an instant hyperproliferation of chatter about it on the networks that comes online around the same time as live posting and eyewitness video or spot analysis. 31:58 And then you get the local and specialist coverage, and then you get the national and international coverage, and the next morning the think tanks wake up and get moving on it. 32:07 And this is always expanding, but we don't really have a corresponding moment of synthesis or contraction of all of that stuff into something that is intelligible to a reasonable person. 32:19 Like, this is wild to me, but you still— like, we can't just go to our networks or really anywhere, speaking in general knowledge terms, I understand the scientists may have this better, and find just like an event node that connects all the sources of relevant information and the the opinions of people we care about in one place. 32:40 Like, we have reporters who can sort of do this high-speed gallop through the relevant context at the beginning of every article they write, and then the next day they wake up and they write another article. 32:50 It's all super atomized. 32:52 There's nothing to bring it together. 32:54 If you want to build a knowledge molecule, you have to do it with your own brain, or you can glom on to someone in the creator or interpreter class some of whom are genuinely world-class, super-gifted analysts, and some of whom are basically semi-deranged street preachers. 33:13 And not everyone can tell the difference all the time. 33:16 So uplifting and reciprocating our gifted interpreters is necessary. 33:22 And I hope we're going to hear more about that this weekend. 33:26 But it also seems to me that we really could get the machines involved. 33:30 In bundling up all of this noise into intelligible collections of material that we could actually learn through and refer to so that it's not so insistently ephemeral and scattered. 33:41 And if this sounds like resuscitating the dream of structured data, it kind of is. 33:48 Yay. 33:51 But I want to put it in service of ordinary people using tech we didn't have before. 33:56 And signals from social that can make this stuff more than like a terrible index. 34:02 And it's odd to me that we have all of these recommendation algorithms working in variously pro and anti-social ways, but as far as I can tell, we haven't effectively brought our social tech to the work of orientation or reorientation in any structured way. 34:20 As again, the science cluster is able to demonstrate we can develop features that cluster and amplify the knowledge people assemble. 34:28 We can do it with machine learning and human curation, probably both of them. 34:33 We could give our communities the tools to do this for their areas of interest or their physical localities or their specializations. 34:41 And we could exist— we could extend existing work on community moderation to rule certain knowledge associations. 34:48 Associations in or out. 34:50 But if we only do this work for highly motivated specialists, we're missing the chance to bring that fire to everyone else. 34:58 And I will now embarrass my old journalism world friend Tyler Fisher and say that I think his work with SIL is admirable and a really good start toward this. 35:07 And some things about the next area I want to talk about, which is mitigating the cognitive and emotional effects of processing so many different emotional registers in one place. 35:21 I think we could give our embodied human selves a break if we were to find a way to split rhetorical registers at the point of reader/viewer contact. 35:33 This is what I mean. 35:34 We go online because we're bored or we're lonely or we want to see what people are talking about. 35:39 Either in a professional or a very unprofessional way. 35:43 But what most of us get when we come online is this amazing puree of like jokes and infighting and scary news and hustling and entertaining nonsense and dumb memes and video evidence of war crimes. 35:59 I think this is genuinely not good for us. 36:02 There's a lot of evidence about this, but honestly, it's kind of weird. 36:07 I wanted it to be stronger. 36:09 There is a study about how rough context switching is for our ability to understand things, but it's mostly focused on format. 36:15 So it's hard to go from video to text, which is fine, but not the same thing. 36:22 There's this really fun paper with 3 studies from a couple of professors of advertising that found that scrolling Instagram for 30 seconds Essentially makes us weak to ads, but especially to ads that have high social signals. 36:39 So we're switching from a more analytical mode to heuristic processing, and if a lot of people appear to have liked the thing, we're more likely to just buy whatever nonsense it is. 36:51 The same paper also includes another experiment showing that people who scroll their social feed for a very brief period also immediately got worse at math and sentence diagramming. 37:01 So that's fun. 37:03 But that's just one paper. 37:04 And there are a few others, but they're not necessarily generalizable. 37:08 So I want to be careful. 37:10 I think we do have two really helpful bodies here of indirect evidence. 37:13 One is the quite beefy body of work on transportive communication, stuff that transports us, which is behind a bunch of the power of storytelling stuff. 37:26 But essentially things that feel transportive, including a lot of first-person testimony, really reduce skepticism and analytical thought. 37:35 And there's a solid pool of evidence and theory there kind of just waiting for someone to step in and work on the effects of trying to move between the transportive and just like quotidian newsy stuff registers in rapid succession over and over again in the same place. 37:51 But the second thing we have is again, like, the evidence of our senses. 37:57 I think there are a few people having a good time in the political news zone on the social internet. 38:05 I think there are journalism and policy people who mostly treat the networks like a brief, mean LinkedIn, which works out well for them. 38:14 And then there are a lot of people, including people in positions of extraordinary power, who treat the experience of modern life and the suffering of others as a spectator blood sport. 38:25 And I do not think that that mode in particular is good or even neutral. 38:31 I think it will— we will not fix the problems with our governance if we continue to allow it to metastasize through our civic life. 38:39 But for the rest of us, this stuff is just exhausting and alienating, and it does things to our brains that we don't like. 38:46 And I want to briefly bring in Joshua Meyerowitz. 38:50 Do we have other Meyerowitz heads in the crowd? 38:52 He wrote No Sense of Place in 1986. 38:54 Oh my God, I'm going to write so many blog posts about Joshua Meyerowitz for you. 38:58 So he's this media scholar whose ideas informed Dana Boyd and Alice Marwick's work on context collapse. 39:06 But he was writing in the mid-'80s, which makes this a little unsettling to me. 39:14 He wrote, "The current merging of situations," by which he means places, "doesn't give us a sum of what we had before, but rather new synthesized behaviors that are qualitatively different. 39:29 If we celebrate our child's wedding in an isolated situation where it is the sole experience of the day, then our joy may be unbounded. 39:37 But when on our way to the wedding, we hear over the car radio of a devastating earthquake earthquake, or the death of a popular entertainer, or the assassination of a political figure, we not only lose our ability to rejoice fully, but also our ability to mourn deeply. 39:53 Unbounded joy and unmitigated misery cannot coexist in the same place and time. 39:59 The situations merge, the hot flush and the icy stare blend into a middle region, cool. 40:06 And for Meyerowitz's cool, I would substitute numb. 40:11 Now, some communities in the decentralized space have tried to deal with this by asking people to either content warn their posts based on the whole panoply of their readers' potential sensitivities, or to divide their expression into separate accounts. 40:26 And I think these people are working from good instincts, but from the wrong end of the problem, given how alienating and anti-convivial it is to be instructed to preprocess your emotional utterances for people you may not even be speaking to. 40:39 But I think we could make this work on the other end. 40:43 And I wanna say if we do it successfully, it will be because we recognize that we cannot rely on like civility-forward sentiment analysis that, for instance, reads Black Americans speaking in a neutral register as aggressive. 40:58 Doing it well would involve grounding in community and doing a lot of training work which would have to be shared across a willing group. 41:06 I don't want to undersell the difficulty, but being able to come online and see a morning experience that starts with like, "Hi friends, it's puppy pictures and selfies," and not have the hard news come online until like after the caffeine kicks in. 41:22 I think this would be transformative. 41:24 And like for me, when I'm working, I would love to be able to filter in posts that match the register I'm working in and hold the puppies and beefs for later. 41:37 I would like to think about this less as feed switching and more like a radio dial. 41:42 Always the people that we like, but with the option to filter different registers in and out to suit different emotional capacities and allow for some separation. 41:52 So those are some thoughts about working on this stuff in kind of lateral ways up in the big open world of the water column. 42:00 And now I want to talk about the other thing. 42:03 The most vibrant part of the kelp forest is in the holdfasts, which act like roots but kind of in reverse. 42:09 Instead of pulling resources out of the soil, they push benefits out to every living thing around them by providing a firmly anchored structure that offers complex and variegated shelter for both the charismatic invertebrates with all the little flowy parts parts, and also to tiny snails and worms and all the other beloved lobies of the kelp forest. 42:32 So one more Joshua Meyerowitz quote from 1986. 42:37 For every moment of our lives, there are things happening someplace that would upset us, that would involve us, that would drain our energies and engage our feelings. 42:46 There are more things that if present and in our view, we would feel compelled to respond to or do something about than could possibly fit into the sane experience a single lifetime. 42:55 Situation segregation, however, acts as a psychosocial shock absorber. 43:01 By selectively exposing ourselves to events and other people, we control the flow of our actions and emotions. 43:08 Compassion, empathy, and even ethics may be more situationally bound than we often care to think. 43:15 I love this guy. 43:18 I feel this in the way that I participate participate in the online world. 43:22 I think we need space to think and feel together that isn't always fully in the current. 43:27 And I feel like probably everybody here gets this. 43:33 It also produces the benefit— also, I think we understand the benefit of not having to send people off protocol into Discords and group chats whenever they need to do that work. 43:44 The Spaces work that the Blue Sky team has been publishing about is going to unlock so many affordances for pro-social things that go well beyond private accounts. 43:53 I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. 43:56 But I also want to make a note. 43:58 I think letting people huddle up inside an anchoring structure also undercuts both the need for and the value of mobbing as territorial defense. 44:09 And I think that's something very real on the networks right now. 44:12 And that also came up in the science track yesterday. 44:15 If you and your community have a cave or a building or little sheltering trees to step into to get out of the broad featureless plain with everyone in it filled with many other communities, some of whom will always hate you, you're not going to have to constantly make up for your lack of shelter by continuously contesting every millimeter of cultural boundary. 44:38 You can just sidestep it. 44:40 This is so so low level that I think it's honestly hard to find ways to talk about. 44:44 But I think we have to, to solve these problems. 44:48 I would like to suggest, as a completely unqualified non-anthropologist, that the entire known history of humans coming together in groups larger than a few families has involved making buildings of one kind or another, and then elaborating those buildings fairly quickly with rooms and divisions. 45:07 Because our structures out in the physical world don't just shield us from the environment, they also give us necessary shelter from each other, which probably brings the murder rate down, among other things. 45:20 So I said earlier that I would revisit the illusion of explanatory depth, which is essentially a pervasive cognitive con that all our brains are running all the time by leading us to believe that we understand things about the world that we actually do not. 45:36 And we don't know that we don't know until we have to explain something or fix something. 45:43 And then it's not there. 45:46 If I had an extra 10 minutes, I would absolutely ask you each to turn to the person next to you and explain how a flush toilet works. 45:56 I've worked on flush toilets. 45:57 I was so wrong. 45:58 It was very upsetting. 46:02 This is usually okay as long as we have reliable sources to refer back to, but it's extremely bad when we don't. 46:10 I wrote a lot about this in the Landslide essay. 46:12 I'll link the relevant research, but the upshot is that for people who care about knowledge, we need to know that we, we don't know very much in our brains, actually, and that our knowledge is not just embodied, but also genuinely social and networked, which means that the quality of knowledge in our networks, when it goes down, we all get less knowledgeable and we all get less capable. 46:38 And I would argue that we all get less free. 46:41 And this is why everything I'm suggesting today centers on treating ordinary people as subjects with agency who deserve workable access to good information in reasonable environments. 46:52 Rather than treating them as consumers whose purpose is to be a manipulable object. 46:58 The science folks from yesterday are already demonstrating the protocol can be used to do knowledge consolidating and brain preserving work. 47:06 But if we don't bring those goods to everyone at all levels, we're going to lose our democracies. 47:12 All of which are predicated on the existence of at least minimally informed civic community who are subjects with agency. 47:21 So I've got one more cool kelp fact for you. 47:25 At least you'll have the kelp facts even if nothing else carries forward. 47:28 Kelp are way older than we thought. 47:30 Until a few years ago, they thought— we thought they were only 14 million years old because we found a kelp fossil and it was 14 million years old. 47:37 But then this amateur fossil collector down in Washington State cracked open some rocks he found on the beach and found something that looked a lot like a fossilized holdfast. 47:48 So he sent it down to the ancient kelp dating nerds at UC Berkeley. 47:53 And the new fossils were around 32 million years old. 47:58 And this is important because it means that the kelp evolved way before all the species that now shelter in their fronds and their holdfasts and became a foundation species without which all that other life would have been impossible. 48:13 Put another way, their presence and the affordances they offered bent the future around them in ways that we now find beautiful and valuable and good. 48:23 To me, the point of working toward knowledge anchoring and against continuous turbulence and trouble is not just short-term as a respite or a little pocket oasis for us and our friends, but toward a genuinely more workable way to think and know together, where together is going to include billions of humans and also many forms of machine assistance. 48:46 And this moment is our window for bending the future around our hopes and values that cherish knowledge and communal knowing and that orient us toward real remedies for some of our most ancient information troubles and pains. 49:02 In service of living together in peace and mutual respect. 49:08 Thank you. 49:20 Oh no. 49:25 Thank you. 49:27 That was lovely. 49:41 Truly, truly leaning toward the wrong mic. 49:45 If you're working on this stuff, if you care about working on this stuff, let's talk. 49:48 Like, that's why I'm here. 49:49 I gave this talk so they'd let me in the door, right? 49:53 But I want to talk to people who are actually trying to fix this. 49:56 Thank you. 49:58 Thank you. 49:58 We have no time for Q&A. 50:03 I didn't go that far. 50:04 We want a couple minutes. 50:06 How these things go.