speaker-0: Hello there. Welcome back to Occasionally Philosophical episode 36, 36. ⁓ Yes, this is the podcast where a father and son, you and I, sit down with microphones and way too many questions about the world. ⁓ we're not experts, we're not gurus, we're just trying to figure out the world out loud. And welcome back with us. I'm Mark and you are my Yeah.
speaker-1: Doug. Yes. Yes, I d I haven't changed.
speaker-0: So ⁓
speaker-1: Not much, anyway.
speaker-0: Well, not your name.
speaker-1: Not my name, yeah. Yeah, still me. Baggage that comes with it too.
speaker-0: Yeah. So last week I th I wanna say we teased what we were gonna talk about, didn't we?
speaker-1: Well, a little bit. We last week you had brought up the algorithmic ⁓ feed fr on your TikTok because you were watching you were paying attention to the Artemis Moon mission. And then your TikTok feed suddenly started being populated with flat Earth and Moonlanding conspiracy thing. So we were we were kind of exploring
speaker-0: ⁓ right, right. Yeah.
speaker-1: that the existence of conspiracy theories and how the internet kind of fosters them, right? Or makes them ⁓ stickier than maybe they might have been otherwise. Interestingly enough, after we talked, over the next couple of days when I would log into YouTube, I I saw a couple of of the flat earth debunking
speaker-0: Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: up in my feed. Now there's there's like one YouTube channel is I want to say Professor Dave Explains or something Yeah well anyway he's a he's ⁓ you know he they I think he makes his living on debunking pseudoscience that's his thing right any anything that he anything that would qualify as pseudoscience you know he grabs and I think one of his things which it is kind of funny where he'll do a video where he'll like
speaker-0: Professor Dave, yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: pick on somebody, but he'll drink while he's doing it, like drinking whiskey or something. ⁓ right. By the end of the video, he's kind of buzzed too. I don't know. Like I said, I've only seen a couple of them, but one of the things that came up on my as I was scrolling through the home screen, ⁓ there's there's Professor Dave ripping upon, you know, some flat earthers. And I thought, all right, well that's part of like what we're
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: confronted with in the internet culture and one of the reasons why I recommended that you at least see if you could get your hands on this or look into it a little bit 'cause it was written in two thousand eight. So, you know, it's almost twenty years ago.
speaker-0: Yeah, that that actually that lecture that I was telling you that I watched of Lee Siegel, he did it was seventeen years old, so this must have been like
speaker-1: Well, oddly enough, like I I bought this book and I read it and he was on the book tour promoting it. So I went up to the city somewhere, you know, somewhere in Manhattan, you know, at at some venue where where he was talking about. Wow. Okay. You know, and ⁓ and that was interesting. ⁓ unfortunately I had just finished reading it, like literally that day on the train, you know, like going up to the city. So I hadn't really had a chance to assimilate.
speaker-0: ⁓
speaker-1: everything, you know, that the arguments or, you know, the cases that he laid out. So I didn't reali I wanted to be able to like engage him in conversation because they had a question and answer session, but I didn't have anything. Right. You know, about the only thing I could think of was like the rise of like Fox News, right, as a source of disinformation. By that point. At least that's my my take on it, right?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, if you got if somebody's listening, they have a different opinion, well, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well how about Welcome to the World, right? Yeah. All right. So well let's so just to be clear in case it hasn't been c we're talking about the book Against the Machine by L C
speaker-1: And the subtitle is Being is Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.
speaker-0: All right, so
speaker-1: Now, ⁓ just one other thing I wanna mention, right? This book was written in two thousand eight. Right. If you look now at like writing books that are coming out about AI, the subtitle is Remaining Human in the Age of AI. Right. So what one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this book up, because there's so much noise about AI right now, obviously. And the
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: There's a through line, I think, right, in the way that people talked about the internet back in those days and the way that people are talking about AI today. In much the same kind of glowing terms and all that kind of stuff. So before we we dive into the book proper, let me ask you this. Why do you think that I asked you to consider this book? Now, in twenty twenty six, given that it was written almost twenty years ago.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Guess well, partly 'cause of what you said just a second ago, because of the way AI they're talking about AI, but also like I feel like he kinda had his pulse on a couple of things in the book that are actually coming to fruition now.
speaker-1: All right. Any is there an example that you remember? I know you said you didn't you weren't able to get your hands on the book proper.
speaker-0: No Right. But like in it was the basically it was like he was talking about how because everyone has a voice, it kind of like flattens out like expertise, I guess, in a sense that like instead of it like, ⁓ I'm a doctor and I say XYZ I mean, even with the flat Earth thing, you know, you got just people Googling stuff on the internet cla claiming that they're no more than a PhD person who went and studied whatever the earth or whatever for years, right? So and where it kind of and it starts to ⁓ sorry, I lost my train of thought. But yeah
speaker-1: Let me read you a quote here. Spreading knowledge to people who lack it has nothing to do with the internet's more rapid dispersal of information that is already available.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: In giving everyone a voice, as the internet boosters boast of having done, is not only very different from enabling the most creative, intelligent, or original voices to be heard. Right? That's one of the boosters, right? ⁓ my God, you like all these people that are really brilliant and that now they can they're accessible to everyone. However, giving everyone a voice, and the the quote continues.
speaker-0: Yes, right.
speaker-1: It can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.
speaker-0: Which is kind of what we see.
speaker-1: Right. Because there's so much noise. Right. There's so much noise. Everybody's got a microphone. You gotta including us. Right. And so if you position yourself in this space as, I'm going to be providing the information that you need, right? There's how do you know, right?
speaker-0: Yeah. Ha ha.
speaker-1: Like I can put. I can make up any kind of title for myself. Right? And in we're overworked and if I sound authoritative, if I sound like I know what I'm talking about.
speaker-0: People tend to believe you.
speaker-1: Why? Because that it's sour wire. It's the same issue it's like it's the same issue that we're finding with AI today, right? Yeah. Because somebody'll go into an AI model and they'll type something in and the AI spits out this authoritative, confident answer. That's completely wrong.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. But if you don't know, you don't know. You can't yeah, how do you check it? And you're busy, you know, okay, I'll take it, I'll run with it. Right. But you know, it he just at this particular point in time, right, remember and the other thing that I want to keep in mind is we've talked about here on our our little podcast, about the difference between living through history and reading about it. Right. You and I were alive. you know, in the mid nineties when the commercial internet hit and we were using it in various ways right on up through he wrote this book. And we've been using it in various and sundry ways right up to today. And so one of the advantages of being able to go back into the, you know, set the Wayback Machine and actually reach back into that time that you lived in, because now it's like, okay, he was writing these things and I was alive at that time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. So what else was I hearing that confirms basically what he says? Right? Like is his perspective, is what is the evidence that he's bringing up in this book, does it match with what I was seeing and hearing? Right. So, you know, one of the things that I that I found interesting about it, right, is You know, th this idea that everything that's coming is always going to be better. Right?
speaker-0: Yeah, we kind of touched on that in a recent episode. Like is technology fixing things or just making problem more problems.
speaker-1: Yeah. You know, and but it's marketed and one of the other books that's sort of rattling around in the back of my head. But this is part of the thing that I also want to highlight is that when this book landed in my world, it landed in it in in soil that was already prepared by Jerrymander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, his book in the Absence of the Sacred. I had already read Ishmael and My Ishmael and the Story of Bee
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And ⁓ Providence by I was already deeply immersed in the Daniel Quinn universe of what you know his arguments were were making. So by the so when this book landed, it landed there into a mind that was already skeptical of ⁓ and highly skeptical of the stories and all of this stuff. So I'm reading along and my head's going, yeah, yeah, yeah,
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: Okay. Or someone else's who maybe ⁓ has a more friendlier relationship with ⁓ the technological society, right? Would be reading this and saying, ⁓ this guy, yeah, he's just he doesn't realize how cool this really is.
speaker-0: Yeah, what i guess what w like, just for people I guess who haven't read the book, like I guess could you summarize like the core argument in the book? 'Cause I feel like we're talking about it but we haven't really
speaker-1: Well the core argument as I as I got it is that I understand it, right? You know, and one of the reasons why I thought it would be kind of useful for us to kind of talk about it in more like a book club kind of a fashion would be because, you know, my take might be as a result of just having forty years of living before the digital world ever popped into my life.
speaker-0: As you understand it, yeah, right.
speaker-1: Well I mean you know me Mark. I I I'm a pencil and paper guy, you know, pen and paper. You know. When I need to work something out, I get I get a pen and a and and a pad and a and a journal or something and I'm writing and I'm you know, dealing with physical books. Right. Yeah. Physical books I can write in the margins, I can underline things I can you know, where I mean I can do that online too. I I grant you, you know, I have an iPad with an Apple pencil and you know it's and a bright and I have liquid text or whatever. It's just it
speaker-0: It's not the same. It doesn't have the same tactile feel, so
speaker-1: It d and again, this is just the way that I was trained. Like i if somebody who was born in, you know, in the twenty first century and learned how to write, you know, on an iPad with an i with a with an Apple pencil, then, you know, that maybe is gonna be different. You know, they'll be able to process that information in a new way. But the the general thrust is that in this internet and as as where we're becoming instead of all right he's tracing a movement from where we became consumers, like from citizens to consumers. So there's a little bit of history in that. Yeah. And then the move from consumers to what he calls prosumers. And I think that that word is actually comes from the book Future Shock, if I'm not mistaken. It's a book that I've seen many, many times over the course of my life. I've seen it referenced a whole lot. And I've picked it up maybe a half a dozen times to try to read it. And every time I do, it just there's just something about it that doesn't grab me. It's just one of those books that just doesn't grab me. So even though I see it referenced a lot,
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: you know, it's just something I'm not familiar with. Now maybe I should fill that hole in my education at some point. You know, I've got twelve hundred other books that need to be read to some, you know. But anyway, it's this movement from
speaker-0: And tougher, toffler.
speaker-1: Yeah, Alvin Toffler, ⁓ Future Shock. That's the one. But We're we're chasing something, right? We're chasing something. And he says I I I don't I don't know. The idea is that you as you become more immersed in this thing, you become less human, right? You i well like part of it is about like the anonymity. Like he was writing a blog, right? For ⁓ part of in fact in the introduction to the book, he talks about the fact that I think he was writing for the New Republic. But at any rate, he's got like a a blog on the new republic. And according to him, the rules for the blog back at this time was, you know, no abusive language, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And yet he's going he's looking at the comments and people are calling him a moron and a mongoloid and all this, you know. Right. And so he says, Well, okay, you know what? Two can play at this game. So he created ⁓ an an anonymous online
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: persona and he went into the comment section of the blog to defend himself, right? Against these charges. Well, apparently it got exposed and he got in trouble, got suspended for a while. But part that was part of the motivation for writing the book was okay, you've got this anonymity. You can hide behind these. And we've talked about that in in not not on our podcast so much, but just, you know, in our regular conversations over the
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: about how you know, you get this anonymous thing online and you behave differently. And so a lot of the book is about that difference in behavior, right? Of our online persona versus our ⁓ offline, you know.
speaker-0: Well, yeah. You there's a lot of things people say in comment sections that they would never say to anybody's face. Yeah. He actually talks in that talk that I was watching, he mentions that like the I forgot which publication he was working for, but he republic he was complaining ⁓ that people in the the the ⁓ comment sections or whatever of his articles were calling him like a pedophile and stuff.
speaker-1: Well yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing that I that's the story that I just said.
speaker-0: ⁓ okay. That's the same yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ let me see. It's i actually it's in the introduction of the book. ⁓ what does he say here? ⁓ here it is. In the talk back section, he says, Mr. Siegel came into many came onto many people's sanctuary, pissed in the urns, farted, and then put his dick upon the altar. Siegel is a retarded mongoloid. Siegel wanted to fuck a child. And then he's gonna I couldn't understand how a serious magazine could allow these things to appear. And written by people who were concealing their true identities. Right. You know, so and And that was when he created the false persona and then it was exposed and there was all the trouble and everything. So he wrote the book. Now he had been a cultural critic. He had been writing about television and things like that for years. So this was sort of also a natural kind of evolution as well. So Your experience, one of the things that, you know, I I would like to get from you, you know, is like your experience of how you've seen the evolution not only of the internet, but of how things have changed as a result of the introduction of this into your life.
speaker-0: ⁓ well, you know, as a elder millennial, zennial, whatever you wanna call it. I mean, I essentially grew up with the internet, you know. I was twelve, thirteen years old when the AOL discs, you know, started coming in the mail. ⁓ and I mean as far as like what I remember, it was like, you know, in the nineties it was, you know, it was new, it was chatrooms, it was like, ⁓ you could just talk to anybody anywhere. You know, and then it was like, okay, you could like buy stuff online, which was like cool. Like I used to, you know, I got into like Wu Tang. So you used to be able to go on, you know, the internet and you'd find these forums and blogs where it's like people are talking about stuff that you like, which was cool, you know. I don't know. And then, you know, I it it kind of went from something I would just do a little research on or just have fun with to, you know, Amazon came around and it just started becoming more and more part of daily life. But even like in 2008, it was like I still kind of remember like. Yeah, like I used the internet, but it wasn't like it is now where it's like I feel like almost every aspect of my life is like online in some form or fashion.
speaker-1: More to the point, what have you noticed about the people that you hang out with?
speaker-0: That's a really hard question because I don't hang out with people, so I'm at work or I'm at home. There isn't s there's so I mean, w what do you mean? Like I mean, I guess co workers
speaker-1: That kind of thing, yeah.
speaker-0: Лай Well, I've noticed a lot of people I don't know, they have harder times some people a lot of people have harder times having conversations, it feels like.
speaker-1: Yeah. That's part of it.
speaker-0: Because in my in my job it's like all I do is talk to people and sometimes those people don't talk back. You know. Awkward social interactions. And there's also like kind of a polariz like I don't know. Anyways, what what do you mean?
speaker-1: ⁓ no, I I I About towards the end of March, right, I was writing, you know, I had written an article for on LinkedIn, Metacognitive Awareness and Other Fairy Tales, part three. And ⁓ Yeah, and I I had, as you know, I had kind of walked away from social media just more broadly in the summer of COVID and George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and all that because it's just It got overwhelming. I I just was I was tired of all the BS that I was seeing on social media. You know, as opposed to like there's the facts on the ground, what's actually happening and on all the crap, you know, the way that people were performing stuff. Social media, I just got so I left. Then, you know, the therapist almost killed me and I blew through my savings and now I'm desperate for work, so I'm back on social media, I'm back on LinkedIn. And so anyway, make a long story short, around the end of March, and I've been struggling with AI is trying to understand AI and the effect that it's having not only on myself, but on the people around me. And, you know, my concern for the the edge cases, the people, the psychosis, the suicides and all that kind of crap, you know, given the fact that I have a history of depression, you know, so I'm I'm concerned about that. Right. ⁓ it's not an academic exercise for me, in other words. But I had seen ⁓ an a post on LinkedIn that appeared to be arguing against the use of AI in certain fields, but it was written by AI. It was obviously written by AI. And so it was like cognitive dissonance. I commented on it, and then a reply came.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That was three replies, actually, building on the argument, all of them generated by AI. And I was like, wait a minute. Did I misread that? So I read the first post again. I went, ⁓ sure enough. That was arguing for the use of AI in these particular fields. Point I was like, ⁓ no, I don't think so, because based on my own understanding of the technology, limited as it might be. And then But I wasn't quite sure why, right? I I just knew I didn't feel right. And then my first impulse was to go to AI, right? To take the argument, feed it into AI and get a and then I was not well that that's just that's just repeating the problem, right? So that was when I get a pen and a p and a pad and I started writing down the argument as I saw it and understood it so I could work it out. Like and if my first impression was that it was self-refuting. Right. You you can't say, well, use an AI by using the AI, right? But that wasn't really it. It was something a little bit deeper than that. And it turned out that it wa that the argument was making a claim and then providing evidence that undermined the claim that it was making. You know, it's we can't get this We this information doesn't exist and then all of a sudden you start providing examples of that information that you just said doesn't exist. So I went, All right, that's one of those arguments that falls into what in my own research I've called premature coherence. You know, like you get into an AI, you give it a half baked idea, and it comes out y it not only comes out fully baked, but the cake is decorated with candles on it. Right. And I you know, and and
speaker-0: Here.
speaker-1: In my own research and trying to understand how to use AI productively, I've called it premature coherence because I'm not ready to say that those things actually do belong together in the same argument. You know, but it does Right. All right. So that was what I thought about that post, but I I didn't quite know how to bring that up again. A few days later Someone apparently had on April Fool's Day, they had gone ahead and they had gone into their AI and they just had the AI create some goofy argument, right? And they posted it on LinkedIn as a joke, right? Hey, it's April Fool's. Let's have a little fun. Well, apparently what happened, and I hadn't seen it, but ⁓ several people commented on the post of how brilliant and insightful and all this th was. And it the person who did it as a joke Right. Obviously it's like, whoa, wait a minute. I this wasn't the reaction that I was expecting.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: Those two things together just made something snap in my head and I was a you know what, I gotta turn this thing off. I'm done.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I can't because every time I go into LinkedIn, there's a series of articles. ⁓ this person's making a post on ⁓ AI writing and they think it's bad. This person's making a post on AI writing why you should rely on it. Or why it's not such a bad thing and this and this and then everybody and and then and all of a sudden like my critical The critic that lives in my head is really active looking at everybody's name and these made up job titles, you know, as some AI innovation digma governance theorist thing, whatever yeah. And and half the time I'm reading it and I'm going, You're not reading the same stuff that I am. You know. And then I just had to walk away. And then it was like I went analog life. I I started grabbing physical books, hardly, you know, turned on the iPad or the laptop, just you know, every once in a while I would, you know, still get an idea and come Google something, or even go to my outlier which has all those different AI models that I can use for free. And, you know, go in with a question, get the AI summary, sil filter out the sacophysie and all that, and then walk away and go think again.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I was sitting outside the other day. Well, on one of the nice days before it got chilly again. And there was these two young teenage girls, not fourteen, fifteen, right around there, walking through the and they both got their cell phones up, right? And they're both staring at the phone. ⁓ They're barely talking to each other, but you know, they are I can see that their mouths are moving and they're nodding. So I know that they're they're actually talking to each other about whatever they're looking at on their phone.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And then it when they get to the corner, you know, by the basketball court there. And then ⁓ they turn around and now they're walking back to the way they came. And at one point they stopped, both of them deeply engrossed in their phone, neither one of them saying anything. And they stood there for a good two, three minutes. Neither one of them moving. You know, the head down, you know the look. Right? And then, you know
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: The one girl looks up and then the says something and then they start walking again. And I was like, Yeah, this isn't good in my head, right? Like that's not good. They just to you're walking around. You can't leave your phone at home or in your pocket and just talk to each other. Right. And so you know, and then I'm like, ⁓ okay, I got this. Then this book is like I I already mentioned that I wanted to talk about it. And so it's like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: We're we're immersed in this stuff. And and then the other thing that got me on to I needed to take like an analog break, you know, like a serious analog break, was when I would turn on like YouTube to watch some of the videos of the people that I follow, the weather, you know, those weather geeks that I just get a and then the you know, like the political commentary and that, that I just try to, you know, stay up on what's happening in the world. And nearly every person that I watched over the period of a couple of days had this, they're exhausted. Right. Trying to produce all this content all the time. And then I got to thinking, Yeah. If you're trying I what do you think, Mark? I mean, one of the I I mean, part of the the conceit of our little podcast thing here is we're only doing it once a week. Right. And we're not trying to comment on current events. Well no, I mean we'll talk about something that's happening, but not ⁓
speaker-0: It's not a political commentary news show. Right.
speaker-1: Or anything, you know, or a cultural commentary news show. ⁓ this happened, right? Because every day there are things that are happening everywhere. Right? And if you need to comment on every single thing that happens in your area of interest, yeah, you're exhausted. You know, I I I talk I I'm I I don't want to mention names, but there was that one young man originally from New Jersey, he's living out in California now, and I started watching his broadcast political commentary back during COVID. And ⁓ at the time, ninety percent of his broadcast he was in a shirt and tie. Right, jack, shirt and tie. And occasionally, you know, like business casual. And, you know, the thing was I don't do ads, I don't take sponsorships, I'm independent, independent, independent. Right. Well now, a few years later, with a couple of books published and ⁓ appearances on the mainstream media, now you turn I I tune in a podcast and he's got the ball cap on backwards, looks like he just got out of the gym with the white t shirt, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, and he's doing ads and sponsorships. Right. Okay. That the medium captures you. Right.
speaker-0: You get Yeah, like at what at what point do you stop being yourself and you start being the algorithm? Because like you said, you're trying, or like Lee Siegel said, you're trying to be more like everybody than anybody, right? So that's what's popular, casual, right? Like that's what's popular now. If the internet was 40 years ago, a suit and tie would have been fresh, you know, right? Whereas now
speaker-1: You you fit yourself into the mold. And and so by doing that, now you get and this is why, you know, it's like it's it's useful to me to have the the memory, right, of this. Because now you have you see commentaries on the performance of authenticity.
speaker-0: Right, exactly.
speaker-1: You're not being authentic. You're performing authenticity.
speaker-0: Right. You're acting authentic.
speaker-1: Yeah. You're acting authentic in order to draw people to you because ⁓ we're all tired of the phoniness. Right? Performance. You're performing something instead of just being, you know, who you are or whatever. All right.
speaker-0: Yeah. And because of the way the internet works and especially more specifically social media, it's like your identity becomes the performance and your your brand. I think he mentions brand too, you know, in there. Instead of just being a person, now you're a brand online.
speaker-1: Mm-hmm. And then now you've got brand management. Right? You're not being authentic, right? And that, you know, the electronic mob, right? Remaining hum being human in the age of the electronic mob. Because well, all right, Mark, we have we have our little YouTube channel and our podcast. And when you go to YouTube Studio, you look at the stats.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And if you're metrics driven, which our modern society is, what do you do? ⁓ well, that video, that topic a lot, you know, people engage with that. So we're gonna do more of that.
speaker-0: Did well.
speaker-1: Now you're captured because as soon as you step out of that, well but where is the capture? We're not captured right now. Why? Because we only have we have less than two hundred and fifty subscribers. We're not making money at this.
speaker-0: So we haven't passed that threshold of are we going to become the algorithm?
speaker-1: Right. Are we go now and that's a question that we we're going to have to face at some point, if ⁓ assuming that, you know, anybody actually finds this interesting. Something happened outside?
speaker-0: That actually so do I guess it brings up a question. Yeah. Do you think that all these people like know like content creators and all the do you think they know what's happening or do you think they're doing it subconsciously?
speaker-1: I the people that I'm that I've noticed over the last couple of weeks, these are people that know what's happening to them. Right. They they they feel it. Right? Because there's a coup generally ⁓ beyond the like the weather geeks and a couple of the the the general progressive center left YouTube, you know, ⁓ news commentary, legal and news commentary that I I pay attention. Mo any other my other ⁓ YouTube usage is generally over in the ⁓ the YouTube philosophers, right? And you know, where they're trying they'll explain or they'll give their take on Plato's Republic or Nietzsche's genealogy of morals or Foucault or whatever. Or, you know, like lectures. Yeah, like actual university lectures. There's that that great guy ⁓ If you're ever interested in like postmodern theory, there's this guy, he's from the s he's from the deep south somewhere. His name is I think it's Rick Roderick. He's got that that great Southern accent, but he's talking about like derrida and Foucault and and all that. It it's just interesting to hear it with that deep southern accent. But ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: But that's that's where I spend most of my time, right? So I'm not seeing but these some of these like online philosophers, they're you they're exhausted. Because they they on the one hand, they want to do what their education, getting you know, chasing their PhDs down prepared them to do. ⁓ but on the other hand, they're fighting against the demands of the algorithm.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Whether they're going you know, how much longer they're gonna be able to produce content and that kind of stuff, I don't know. But you can see the struggle, you know, in some of them. At least I can, you know, where they're they're trying to, you know, speak about the things that matter to them, at the same time present it in a way that is quote unquote accessible.
speaker-0: Sorry, was that a question or
speaker-1: Well, it was an opening for you to give me a chance to take a sip of my coffee.
speaker-0: Yeah, I sorry you just get on a roll sometime.
speaker-1: I d yeah well yeah, I know. you're used to meeting
speaker-0: I didn't know where to interject and then you just randomly stopped. It felt So I guess like I think the I mean, I had a question that I wrote down but I kinda more that I think about it don't really I think it is a problem. It's a in los is losing trust in experts a problem or a correction.
speaker-1: Okay. So what do you think?
speaker-0: Well it I don't think that you should necessarily like blindly trust anybody because even somebody that's an expert could be wrong, right? So I mean, that's one of the reasons why like I tend I like science in the sense that it's not just like one expert. It's like a bunch of people doing independent studies all over here and there and they are all coming to the same conclusions. Right. ⁓ So I don't you know, there should 'cause what is that? Isn't that a fa appeal to authority?
speaker-1: It is a it is an informal fallacy, appeal to a
speaker-0: Just trust somebody just because they're an expert.
speaker-1: Well, in other words, the in one of the things you see, and this happens in the in the pseudoscience thing, right? So in other words, let's just say that you have a PhD in ⁓ American history.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: And you're well respected, not you know, y you didn't just you know, you didn't get your PhD and become a hack. You know, you you got it and you're a well respected historian.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Does that give you the right or does that give you should I defer to you if you offer me an opinion on economics?
speaker-0: Necessarily, or probably not, because I don't know what well like what it
speaker-1: To the extent that a historian of American history would have paid attention to the American economy. Yeah. Again, historian and economist, they're different things. So if you're depending on Dr. Mark, the historian, for economic
speaker-0: Maybe, yeah. Two different things.
speaker-1: history, you might be making a mistake. Right. You might it me maybe Dr. Mark says something about economics, right? That that sounds right to me. And I trust him because I've been following his historical work and he's not and he's he's solid. Right. Now if I just run with your opinion on
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: economics at that point, I'm probably committing that fallacy of appeal to authority, or I'm using you to beat somebody up. ⁓ no, you're wrong because Mark says. Right? But now if I take that and then I I go, I take, you know, Dr. Mark's economic opinion, and maybe I go and I compare it to Joe Stiglitz, a noble laureate in economics. ⁓ okay. And if he
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: seems to be saying the same thing. ⁓ okay. Now my appeal to you is not wrong necessarily. Right. But if I appeal to Dr. Mark the historian to confirm something about quantum mechanics.
speaker-0: Because the
speaker-1: Yeah, and you know, but this is the thing, y you know, and ⁓ we're busy. You know, you see an article, it says, you know, Mark Cipolla, PhD. ⁓ okay, well he's got a PhD, that means ⁓ you know, whatever but no, because the PhD is focused.
speaker-0: ⁓ It's it's the part of those mental shortcuts. Right.
speaker-1: Nobody has a PhD in everything. As far nobody has a PhD in everything as far as I know.
speaker-0: Well, and I I would I almost feel like that probably even started like before like the internet was super big 'cause like, you know, you have like these news channels, you know, once news became entertainment, you have all these news channels that's just having all these experts arguing about I don't even know if you're an expert in the thing that we're talking about here. You're you're an expert
speaker-1: You know, you just you y you have people that are on there that are yelling at each other, offering different opinions, you're trying to sort through it, and it and in especially in modern life, it's all tribal signaling anyway. It's hardly it's not really designed to generate any real insight or understanding. Right? You're just scoring points. Day for my team, you know, kinda thing. one
speaker-0: Right, which is Yeah.
speaker-1: That's kind we're we're talking about expertise and stuff and and how the media environment has changed. And I don't know if you remember Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner. No, you don't remember. All right, that's that's before your time. But anyway, there was that Gilda Radner, she's extraordinarily funny woman, died of I think ⁓ breast cancer or something like that, far too young. but at any rate, one of the the skits on Saturday Night Live was her going on to offer these editorial replies where she would mistake you know, say and this was part of like the the media environment of the time. Because news was news. It wasn't like it is today. It wasn't like opinion shows. Right. So if someone had an opinion, they would write an editorial, submit it to the station, and then at the end of the news broadcast, they would give that, you know, this person a couple of minutes to read their opinion. And then ⁓ the fairness doctrine that was enforced at the time required the station then to provide equal time for a rebuttal.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. And the Gilda Radnett thing was she would come up to do these rebuttals and then they would explain to her that she misunderstood the point and she would always end, ⁓ never mind. That was the joke. Yeah. And it was funny because there was that
speaker-0: That was happening.
speaker-1: that we ⁓ that we all lived in. We knew that that was the way things work. So that's what made it funny. You know, you to show that skit to people today and they wouldn't understand what the hell they w like what is right, 'cause they don't have that that frame of reference.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: You know, so where do you find your experts? Right. And then then you get into, you know, then this draws into some of the postmodern critiques of, you know, well, who qualifies as an expert? Right? You know, and you you go, ⁓ well, because this person went to that university and did all these things, now you decide that they're the person that knows more than I do. Right. And one of the consequences of the internet. that I I'd have to find it I ⁓ in the book. I don't have my post-it notes. I wasn't sure if you were gonna be ready or not. so ⁓ but one of the things that he he he talks about in here is you know how to find you know the expert. And you know, that my opinion is just as good as your facts. No. You know, because what happens to you I know that one of the things that you do when you're bored on like you're doing ⁓ Grubhub, right? And you're bored, right? So you're sitting there waiting for an order, so you open up TikTok and you're just scrolling through TikTok. Is there anything that's actually useful in that feat? Do you ever learn anything or is it just killing time?
speaker-0: Most of the time it's probably just gilling killing time because in a lot of a lot of the videos are that internet arguing. It's like this person made a video, now this person's d debunking that video and this person's debunking and then it's just, you know, it starts becoming B so the point is is most of the time it's like a w it's either purely entertainment, like it's funny or whatever, cool, you know. It's People arguing on the internet, which I would say is like a waste of time because usually you're not You're not really talking about like it'll be, you know, you'll bring up a news story, right? And it's like you're talking around the issue instead of talking about the actual issue, so that's a waste of time. You know, or it's just outrage. It's just stuff that's pissing me off. Yeah. You know. So I try to curb it, but it's like, you know.
speaker-1: Yeah. So But now here here's the thing that I've been noticing, right? And and again one of the reasons why I like this r resonated with me, right? It's because like I've been noticing the way that I feel. You know, I I've gotten to the point where in my own recovery where I'm now I'm doing the somatic, those r trauma release exercises. Right. And because whatever. But the I notice how I feel more often. So like I I'll even when I watch, like, okay, I'll turn on one of my political commentators. And maybe that's a twenty five minute video, right? Where he's talking about the war, whatever. And by the end of it, I'm agitated.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: All right, hold on a second. So turn the TV up or walk away from the computer, turn the iP you know, the iPad down, and just get away from YouTube. And then I'm like, why am I agitated? ⁓ okay, because there's nothing I can do about this thing that they just told me about. Right? It upsets me that it's happening, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: So I have an option I can jump into the comment section on the video, right? And and have something to say or So from a a personal management standpoint, I'm that's what I'm trying to do is like, all right, notice how I feel, then walk away from it. All right, walk away, walk away. ⁓ it'cause the the the combination of like all of this noise on LinkedIn, I'm trying to sort through it so I can find somebody that'll give me a job or allow me to earn some money. ⁓ And then, you know, I YouTube and all this stuff and and and then you know, walking around outside trying to go, you know, now that the weather's getting nicer and I can get back outside again, ⁓ you know, walking around and and trying to find someone to engage with and everybody's you know, staring at their phone.
speaker-0: Yeah. Even if they're not staring at their that's what I was gonna say, even if they're not staring at their phone, they got headphones in, so it's like, you know
speaker-1: Yeah, you go you know, or you go to say something to them and then you realize that they got headphones on. ⁓ my god, ⁓ forget it. You know, I'm not gonna talk to this person either. And so they're all living in their little this this little world and then there are a lot of other peripheral things that that that people are talking about.
speaker-0: Did you ever this is really way off topic, but Sure. It just did you ever see those pic there was like a photographer, ⁓ some artist basically took a bunch of pictures of people, like, you know, at the park, at the dinner table and blah, blah, blah. And then he like removed the phones out of the picture. I
speaker-1: Now I heard about that. I actually I haven't seen the pictures, but I did hear that someone had done something like that.
speaker-0: It's even reminding me because it's like you, you know, you're talking about the the young girls walking with their phones, like, you know, and even, you know, my son or stepson is like constantly, you know, he's walking down the stairs looking at his phone. It's like, bro, you'd be able to walk down the stairs faster if you just paid attention to what you're doing, you know, instead of walking around with the phone. But it's like
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: There's kind of the I don't know, like w with all this that I've learned about the the addictiveness of this technology because it's like the idea, like they do it like this on purpose, right? 'Cause they want us to be staring at it 'cause the more we stare at it, that equals dollar signs for them.
speaker-1: Yeah, well that they they call it the attention economy. Right. In two thousand eight, when this book was written, that was not that wasn't a thing. But now it is the attention economy. And interestingly enough, many of the architects of this technology, you know, the stickiness of it and all that are now making the rounds on the podcast going, that was bad, we should have done it.
speaker-0: A thing, yeah. Well yeah, it's like you It's like distributing a drug to the masses and then being like after everyone's all drug addicts, you're like, Oops, my bad. Like I didn't
speaker-1: Well all right, if you didn't know
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. If you didn't know it was addictive. Right. But you know, the thing that and interestingly enough, I I have to make the comparison when I was when I was start I picked the book up again to flip through it, which is why I'm I might sound a little less sure of certain things than I than I might be. ⁓
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: But I was flipping through it and one of the things that he notes in the introduction of the book was he makes this comparison to the automobile industry. Right. Like the when the automobile you know, automobiles were new and they were marketed marvels of convenience and d you know, all this stuff. And they were hurdling death traps, right? For a whole bunch of reasons. Seat belts, ⁓ there were lots of chrome, you know. So the sun would hit it, you're blinded, you know, you don't have mirrors where you need ⁓ you can't see things. And but yet the auto industry all ⁓ there's nothing we can do, nothing we can do, nothing we can do until nineteen sixty five when Ralph Nader published his book Unsafe at Any Speed.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well also yeah, you're
speaker-1: And they realized then it was like, ⁓ yeah, we knew our engineers had been telling us this stuff for years, but for profit. Mm-hmm. Right.
speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Capitalism.
speaker-1: Well, yeah. You're letting your color show again, Mark. But ⁓ and so then changes were made. Right. And so his thesis is that and then well you could also make the comparison to the tobacco industry as well. That they knew A that the product was addictive and B that it was deadly.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. So they they, you know, buried the it's deadly, you know. ⁓ it's not really addictive, it's a choice. Right. And then but eventually, you know, the the preponderance of evidence finally comes out and off you go. So Siegel's point is that the internet, at least in the at the time he was writing, was being promoted in much the same way that automobiles were.
speaker-0: You choose to spend
speaker-1: It's just a marvel of convenience and and all this great stuff and no consideration at all of any harms that might accrue as a result of that. And some of the things that he writes about or he wrote about here as this might happen actually seems like it actually did happen. Right? You know, as like the amount of disinformation, for example.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: and the speed at which it spreads. And then th this is where I get into all kinds of trouble though, because I'm like there I have so many other things that are that I've touched on that I've read or that are in the pile of things that I need to like lock down. I've got the Legos like like placed all next to each other, but now I pick ⁓ up and start snapping them together. And ⁓ part of that is like the way that information moves through these networks.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: And there are tools that are available for that. Like there's this thing called the Media Cloud at MIT, which was used by a couple of authors for a book called Network Propaganda. You know You know, change you know, changing how stories like move through and how they which would be useful for your conspiracy theory thing. You could use it for that, like to find out who said it first and then who picked it up.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: A and that kind of stuff. So Do you are you familiar with the ⁓ the culture of narcissism?
speaker-0: mean I've heard that phrase before but I'm not sure like I mean I know what narcissist is but like
speaker-1: Well, back in I think it was the early nineteen seventies, there was a social critic, Christopher Lash, who wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism. Right. And it it's interesting because when we talk about like well when we talked about Lippmann and Bernays and the propaganda model and all of that, I got I got that door opened to me through the Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self, right? And the rise of the individual and like your needs, what you want is the important thing. And Christopher Lash was commenting on that therapeutic culture. Right? Well, he brings it up here. Where he says Lash believe that all this evasive self obsession, right? So more and more people were writing about their interior lives. As opposed to what's going on in the world, right? Yeah, what's going on and so how ⁓ how do I feel about what's going on?
speaker-0: Yeah. Going on the side mile. Right.
speaker-1: But he says it drove people further into themselves and it created an inner emptiness by exalting the self and cutting it off from reality. Right. Now is that what Siegel is saying in this book is that Lash's observations from the nineteen seventies are now actually manifesting in the world because he's saying, Well, I read Lash's book and now I'm looking at this internet culture of the early aughts and this is what he's seeing. Right. Right. Now. Does that make sense to you? Do you think that that's Part of what we're seeing today.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, 'cause it's like like you said, your online identity is is all it's you, it's your ego, it's your brand, so it's narcissistic in a way, like right. Is that what you mean?
speaker-1: But now here here's the thing, right? Think about like you were you mentioned a little while ago, like on TikTok, like a lot of a lot of what you see is all right, maybe me, right? You're scrolling through, up, there's Doug, and Doug's got a little two minute riff on some stupid thing that some politician said. Yeah. Right. And then the next video is Someone commenting on Doug's comment on what that politician said. Right. And then someone the next video was someone commenting on the comment on the comment on Doug's video. Right. Kind of thing. And nobody really cares about anybody else's opinion.
speaker-0: Well, it's it's yeah, it's all a lot of it to me, i it's performative, it's distracting, and it almost feels distracting, like as if it's the point, you know, like a a perfect example of that is you may or may not have heard, ⁓ but there was CNN did a piece on this like rape academy. ⁓ okay. Anyways, there is a adult website, right, that apparently had a a subsection of videos where it was women that were sleeping. And apparently these were like real, not like actors. And then there was a whole group chat where Men were trading secrets on how to rape their wives. How to drug them and there was a whole story where this guy basically had his ⁓ what I think what sparked the in i investigation or whatever was there was this guy basically had his wife raped by like over seventy guys. He would just drug her and then anyways, 'cause men are pieces of shit. I Not all men, but all men. I'll just say it. Just like people are stupid. So anyways, that it's really it's a lot. Like men are I know I'm a man, but men are terrible. And but anyways, my point in bringing that up is
speaker-1: ⁓ I w I'm gonna we'll push but we'll have to we'll have to talk about that one.
speaker-0: Yeah, but the point of me bringing it up is because what I've been seeing on TikTok is exactly what you just described. So there's numbers that are involved, you know, how many website hits that this website has, how many videos there are, and how many people were actually in this telegram group, right? And all of those numbers are different. You know, it's like sixty-two million. website hits twenty thousand videos on whatever bad bad things and a thousand or two thousand whatever was people in this group chat, right? That's all the conversations that I've been seeing are about. It's about you're spreading misinformation. You're trying to protect, you're trying to defend men. You're trying to, and it's like these back and forth of people just commenting on the numbers and whether or not you're spreading misinformation and all this stuff. And it's like, like you said, you're we're not talking about the actual issue. We're talking about
speaker-1: And yeah, well jeez.
speaker-0: Yeah, I know that was a really trigger warning, late a late trigger warning case, but it it's that's just what's been on my TikTok feed for like the past week, basically. You know, because I think the article came out in late March, but the the TikTok algorithm and everything started talking about it a few days ago. But anyways, yeah, on that horrible note, ⁓ we've been going for like an hour. So ⁓ you know, one of the good things,
speaker-1: You need to warn me about shit like that.
speaker-0: Sorry. Yeah, I should have been warned when I
speaker-1: How I feel about men abusing women.
speaker-0: It's no, yeah, I know. It's you know. It's the worst fucking excuse me, worst thing ever. ⁓
speaker-1: You know, I mean the other day I mean
speaker-0: Yeah, you don't even want to hear the other stories that I've heard that led to that, but No No, I don't. ⁓ but anyways, that's been
speaker-1: I no something I gotta say before we we end this. Right. There's been a lot of I I I've seen it, a lot of these, you know, ⁓ supposed saviors of the young boys, right? You know, talking about, you know, how the left is losing men or the rights gaining men and all this political bullshit. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: If there's a man, a sh a male that's listening to me right now.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That woman that you're looking at is a human being. First and foremost. First and foremost, she's got desires and needs and wants just like
speaker-0: First and foremost. Yeah. I like the the the idea that the like the way you would feel if a gay man like a straight man, the way you would feel if a gay man just came up to you and started doing stuff, whether it's being overly flirtatious or just think about that.
speaker-1: Yeah, you're you're okay, yeah, that's a good one, Mark. You're a straight man and you know, a gay guy comes up, l thinks you're hot, and all of a sudden his hand's down your pants. You know, and you on the neck. You don't like that, then you damn well better never fucking do it to a woman.
speaker-0: If you don't if you can't come Right.
speaker-1: Right. And I'm tired of hearing about what it takes to be a man. And if you think that being a man means not having respect for other human beings that you don't approve of, then you need to read a different book. Find somebody different to talk to. Seventy five.
speaker-0: Right for humans are the first. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ on that, like I said, terrible note. thanks for joining us. ⁓ we'll try to not end on such a we had a good conversation. Hold on, hold on. But ⁓ just with the internet, everyone has a voice. Not everyone has something that should be heard, but you know, there's that. And ⁓ once again, this has been episode thirty six of Occasionally Philosophical. I don't know if we learned anything, but we did ask questions and we ⁓ hopefully we gave you something to think about, you know, maybe talk about on your next car ride. and ⁓ yeah, ⁓ with you know, all the stuff. We got a Patreon now. It's gonna be linked in the the the merch store. We gotta go fund me going for you. listen to our podcasts on all the things, you know, Spotify, all that fun stuff. yeah, I guess that's all the the business end of the stuff. So do you have any closing statements or thoughts? something other
speaker-1: No. ⁓ I was going to try to find something a little bit more uplifting, but all my all my comic books are in the other room. ⁓ yeah, I I again ⁓ thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us. ⁓ when it comes to you and me have to have a talk about the stuff that you're gonna bring up. You d you need to let me know when you're gonna hit me with something like
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ but anyway, thank you for joining us. ⁓ we did the we did the you know, if you like the conversation, click like. If you didn't like it, click on you know, you didn't like it, offer us a comment that as much as we complain about the algorithmic control of our lives, ⁓ in order for you to stay current with whatever the kid and I are trying to figure out, you need to, you know, click like, comment so that the algorithm will bring our stuff to your attention. Or you can pay attention to something else that's gonna be considerably less interesting.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. All right. Anyways. I didn't say that, did I? Yeah.
speaker-1: All right. Until next week. All right.
speaker-1: Doug. Yes. Yes, I d I haven't changed.
speaker-0: So ⁓
speaker-1: Not much, anyway.
speaker-0: Well, not your name.
speaker-1: Not my name, yeah. Yeah, still me. Baggage that comes with it too.
speaker-0: Yeah. So last week I th I wanna say we teased what we were gonna talk about, didn't we?
speaker-1: Well, a little bit. We last week you had brought up the algorithmic ⁓ feed fr on your TikTok because you were watching you were paying attention to the Artemis Moon mission. And then your TikTok feed suddenly started being populated with flat Earth and Moonlanding conspiracy thing. So we were we were kind of exploring
speaker-0: ⁓ right, right. Yeah.
speaker-1: that the existence of conspiracy theories and how the internet kind of fosters them, right? Or makes them ⁓ stickier than maybe they might have been otherwise. Interestingly enough, after we talked, over the next couple of days when I would log into YouTube, I I saw a couple of of the flat earth debunking
speaker-0: Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: up in my feed. Now there's there's like one YouTube channel is I want to say Professor Dave Explains or something Yeah well anyway he's a he's ⁓ you know he they I think he makes his living on debunking pseudoscience that's his thing right any anything that he anything that would qualify as pseudoscience you know he grabs and I think one of his things which it is kind of funny where he'll do a video where he'll like
speaker-0: Professor Dave, yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: pick on somebody, but he'll drink while he's doing it, like drinking whiskey or something. ⁓ right. By the end of the video, he's kind of buzzed too. I don't know. Like I said, I've only seen a couple of them, but one of the things that came up on my as I was scrolling through the home screen, ⁓ there's there's Professor Dave ripping upon, you know, some flat earthers. And I thought, all right, well that's part of like what we're
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: confronted with in the internet culture and one of the reasons why I recommended that you at least see if you could get your hands on this or look into it a little bit 'cause it was written in two thousand eight. So, you know, it's almost twenty years ago.
speaker-0: Yeah, that that actually that lecture that I was telling you that I watched of Lee Siegel, he did it was seventeen years old, so this must have been like
speaker-1: Well, oddly enough, like I I bought this book and I read it and he was on the book tour promoting it. So I went up to the city somewhere, you know, somewhere in Manhattan, you know, at at some venue where where he was talking about. Wow. Okay. You know, and ⁓ and that was interesting. ⁓ unfortunately I had just finished reading it, like literally that day on the train, you know, like going up to the city. So I hadn't really had a chance to assimilate.
speaker-0: ⁓
speaker-1: everything, you know, that the arguments or, you know, the cases that he laid out. So I didn't reali I wanted to be able to like engage him in conversation because they had a question and answer session, but I didn't have anything. Right. You know, about the only thing I could think of was like the rise of like Fox News, right, as a source of disinformation. By that point. At least that's my my take on it, right?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, if you got if somebody's listening, they have a different opinion, well, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well how about Welcome to the World, right? Yeah. All right. So well let's so just to be clear in case it hasn't been c we're talking about the book Against the Machine by L C
speaker-1: And the subtitle is Being is Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.
speaker-0: All right, so
speaker-1: Now, ⁓ just one other thing I wanna mention, right? This book was written in two thousand eight. Right. If you look now at like writing books that are coming out about AI, the subtitle is Remaining Human in the Age of AI. Right. So what one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this book up, because there's so much noise about AI right now, obviously. And the
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: There's a through line, I think, right, in the way that people talked about the internet back in those days and the way that people are talking about AI today. In much the same kind of glowing terms and all that kind of stuff. So before we we dive into the book proper, let me ask you this. Why do you think that I asked you to consider this book? Now, in twenty twenty six, given that it was written almost twenty years ago.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Guess well, partly 'cause of what you said just a second ago, because of the way AI they're talking about AI, but also like I feel like he kinda had his pulse on a couple of things in the book that are actually coming to fruition now.
speaker-1: All right. Any is there an example that you remember? I know you said you didn't you weren't able to get your hands on the book proper.
speaker-0: No Right. But like in it was the basically it was like he was talking about how because everyone has a voice, it kind of like flattens out like expertise, I guess, in a sense that like instead of it like, ⁓ I'm a doctor and I say XYZ I mean, even with the flat Earth thing, you know, you got just people Googling stuff on the internet cla claiming that they're no more than a PhD person who went and studied whatever the earth or whatever for years, right? So and where it kind of and it starts to ⁓ sorry, I lost my train of thought. But yeah
speaker-1: Let me read you a quote here. Spreading knowledge to people who lack it has nothing to do with the internet's more rapid dispersal of information that is already available.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: In giving everyone a voice, as the internet boosters boast of having done, is not only very different from enabling the most creative, intelligent, or original voices to be heard. Right? That's one of the boosters, right? ⁓ my God, you like all these people that are really brilliant and that now they can they're accessible to everyone. However, giving everyone a voice, and the the quote continues.
speaker-0: Yes, right.
speaker-1: It can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.
speaker-0: Which is kind of what we see.
speaker-1: Right. Because there's so much noise. Right. There's so much noise. Everybody's got a microphone. You gotta including us. Right. And so if you position yourself in this space as, I'm going to be providing the information that you need, right? There's how do you know, right?
speaker-0: Yeah. Ha ha.
speaker-1: Like I can put. I can make up any kind of title for myself. Right? And in we're overworked and if I sound authoritative, if I sound like I know what I'm talking about.
speaker-0: People tend to believe you.
speaker-1: Why? Because that it's sour wire. It's the same issue it's like it's the same issue that we're finding with AI today, right? Yeah. Because somebody'll go into an AI model and they'll type something in and the AI spits out this authoritative, confident answer. That's completely wrong.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. But if you don't know, you don't know. You can't yeah, how do you check it? And you're busy, you know, okay, I'll take it, I'll run with it. Right. But you know, it he just at this particular point in time, right, remember and the other thing that I want to keep in mind is we've talked about here on our our little podcast, about the difference between living through history and reading about it. Right. You and I were alive. you know, in the mid nineties when the commercial internet hit and we were using it in various ways right on up through he wrote this book. And we've been using it in various and sundry ways right up to today. And so one of the advantages of being able to go back into the, you know, set the Wayback Machine and actually reach back into that time that you lived in, because now it's like, okay, he was writing these things and I was alive at that time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. So what else was I hearing that confirms basically what he says? Right? Like is his perspective, is what is the evidence that he's bringing up in this book, does it match with what I was seeing and hearing? Right. So, you know, one of the things that I that I found interesting about it, right, is You know, th this idea that everything that's coming is always going to be better. Right?
speaker-0: Yeah, we kind of touched on that in a recent episode. Like is technology fixing things or just making problem more problems.
speaker-1: Yeah. You know, and but it's marketed and one of the other books that's sort of rattling around in the back of my head. But this is part of the thing that I also want to highlight is that when this book landed in my world, it landed in it in in soil that was already prepared by Jerrymander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, his book in the Absence of the Sacred. I had already read Ishmael and My Ishmael and the Story of Bee
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And ⁓ Providence by I was already deeply immersed in the Daniel Quinn universe of what you know his arguments were were making. So by the so when this book landed, it landed there into a mind that was already skeptical of ⁓ and highly skeptical of the stories and all of this stuff. So I'm reading along and my head's going, yeah, yeah, yeah,
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: Okay. Or someone else's who maybe ⁓ has a more friendlier relationship with ⁓ the technological society, right? Would be reading this and saying, ⁓ this guy, yeah, he's just he doesn't realize how cool this really is.
speaker-0: Yeah, what i guess what w like, just for people I guess who haven't read the book, like I guess could you summarize like the core argument in the book? 'Cause I feel like we're talking about it but we haven't really
speaker-1: Well the core argument as I as I got it is that I understand it, right? You know, and one of the reasons why I thought it would be kind of useful for us to kind of talk about it in more like a book club kind of a fashion would be because, you know, my take might be as a result of just having forty years of living before the digital world ever popped into my life.
speaker-0: As you understand it, yeah, right.
speaker-1: Well I mean you know me Mark. I I I'm a pencil and paper guy, you know, pen and paper. You know. When I need to work something out, I get I get a pen and a and and a pad and a and a journal or something and I'm writing and I'm you know, dealing with physical books. Right. Yeah. Physical books I can write in the margins, I can underline things I can you know, where I mean I can do that online too. I I grant you, you know, I have an iPad with an Apple pencil and you know it's and a bright and I have liquid text or whatever. It's just it
speaker-0: It's not the same. It doesn't have the same tactile feel, so
speaker-1: It d and again, this is just the way that I was trained. Like i if somebody who was born in, you know, in the twenty first century and learned how to write, you know, on an iPad with an i with a with an Apple pencil, then, you know, that maybe is gonna be different. You know, they'll be able to process that information in a new way. But the the general thrust is that in this internet and as as where we're becoming instead of all right he's tracing a movement from where we became consumers, like from citizens to consumers. So there's a little bit of history in that. Yeah. And then the move from consumers to what he calls prosumers. And I think that that word is actually comes from the book Future Shock, if I'm not mistaken. It's a book that I've seen many, many times over the course of my life. I've seen it referenced a whole lot. And I've picked it up maybe a half a dozen times to try to read it. And every time I do, it just there's just something about it that doesn't grab me. It's just one of those books that just doesn't grab me. So even though I see it referenced a lot,
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: you know, it's just something I'm not familiar with. Now maybe I should fill that hole in my education at some point. You know, I've got twelve hundred other books that need to be read to some, you know. But anyway, it's this movement from
speaker-0: And tougher, toffler.
speaker-1: Yeah, Alvin Toffler, ⁓ Future Shock. That's the one. But We're we're chasing something, right? We're chasing something. And he says I I I don't I don't know. The idea is that you as you become more immersed in this thing, you become less human, right? You i well like part of it is about like the anonymity. Like he was writing a blog, right? For ⁓ part of in fact in the introduction to the book, he talks about the fact that I think he was writing for the New Republic. But at any rate, he's got like a a blog on the new republic. And according to him, the rules for the blog back at this time was, you know, no abusive language, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And yet he's going he's looking at the comments and people are calling him a moron and a mongoloid and all this, you know. Right. And so he says, Well, okay, you know what? Two can play at this game. So he created ⁓ an an anonymous online
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: persona and he went into the comment section of the blog to defend himself, right? Against these charges. Well, apparently it got exposed and he got in trouble, got suspended for a while. But part that was part of the motivation for writing the book was okay, you've got this anonymity. You can hide behind these. And we've talked about that in in not not on our podcast so much, but just, you know, in our regular conversations over the
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: about how you know, you get this anonymous thing online and you behave differently. And so a lot of the book is about that difference in behavior, right? Of our online persona versus our ⁓ offline, you know.
speaker-0: Well, yeah. You there's a lot of things people say in comment sections that they would never say to anybody's face. Yeah. He actually talks in that talk that I was watching, he mentions that like the I forgot which publication he was working for, but he republic he was complaining ⁓ that people in the the the ⁓ comment sections or whatever of his articles were calling him like a pedophile and stuff.
speaker-1: Well yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing that I that's the story that I just said.
speaker-0: ⁓ okay. That's the same yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ let me see. It's i actually it's in the introduction of the book. ⁓ what does he say here? ⁓ here it is. In the talk back section, he says, Mr. Siegel came into many came onto many people's sanctuary, pissed in the urns, farted, and then put his dick upon the altar. Siegel is a retarded mongoloid. Siegel wanted to fuck a child. And then he's gonna I couldn't understand how a serious magazine could allow these things to appear. And written by people who were concealing their true identities. Right. You know, so and And that was when he created the false persona and then it was exposed and there was all the trouble and everything. So he wrote the book. Now he had been a cultural critic. He had been writing about television and things like that for years. So this was sort of also a natural kind of evolution as well. So Your experience, one of the things that, you know, I I would like to get from you, you know, is like your experience of how you've seen the evolution not only of the internet, but of how things have changed as a result of the introduction of this into your life.
speaker-0: ⁓ well, you know, as a elder millennial, zennial, whatever you wanna call it. I mean, I essentially grew up with the internet, you know. I was twelve, thirteen years old when the AOL discs, you know, started coming in the mail. ⁓ and I mean as far as like what I remember, it was like, you know, in the nineties it was, you know, it was new, it was chatrooms, it was like, ⁓ you could just talk to anybody anywhere. You know, and then it was like, okay, you could like buy stuff online, which was like cool. Like I used to, you know, I got into like Wu Tang. So you used to be able to go on, you know, the internet and you'd find these forums and blogs where it's like people are talking about stuff that you like, which was cool, you know. I don't know. And then, you know, I it it kind of went from something I would just do a little research on or just have fun with to, you know, Amazon came around and it just started becoming more and more part of daily life. But even like in 2008, it was like I still kind of remember like. Yeah, like I used the internet, but it wasn't like it is now where it's like I feel like almost every aspect of my life is like online in some form or fashion.
speaker-1: More to the point, what have you noticed about the people that you hang out with?
speaker-0: That's a really hard question because I don't hang out with people, so I'm at work or I'm at home. There isn't s there's so I mean, w what do you mean? Like I mean, I guess co workers
speaker-1: That kind of thing, yeah.
speaker-0: Лай Well, I've noticed a lot of people I don't know, they have harder times some people a lot of people have harder times having conversations, it feels like.
speaker-1: Yeah. That's part of it.
speaker-0: Because in my in my job it's like all I do is talk to people and sometimes those people don't talk back. You know. Awkward social interactions. And there's also like kind of a polariz like I don't know. Anyways, what what do you mean?
speaker-1: ⁓ no, I I I About towards the end of March, right, I was writing, you know, I had written an article for on LinkedIn, Metacognitive Awareness and Other Fairy Tales, part three. And ⁓ Yeah, and I I had, as you know, I had kind of walked away from social media just more broadly in the summer of COVID and George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and all that because it's just It got overwhelming. I I just was I was tired of all the BS that I was seeing on social media. You know, as opposed to like there's the facts on the ground, what's actually happening and on all the crap, you know, the way that people were performing stuff. Social media, I just got so I left. Then, you know, the therapist almost killed me and I blew through my savings and now I'm desperate for work, so I'm back on social media, I'm back on LinkedIn. And so anyway, make a long story short, around the end of March, and I've been struggling with AI is trying to understand AI and the effect that it's having not only on myself, but on the people around me. And, you know, my concern for the the edge cases, the people, the psychosis, the suicides and all that kind of crap, you know, given the fact that I have a history of depression, you know, so I'm I'm concerned about that. Right. ⁓ it's not an academic exercise for me, in other words. But I had seen ⁓ an a post on LinkedIn that appeared to be arguing against the use of AI in certain fields, but it was written by AI. It was obviously written by AI. And so it was like cognitive dissonance. I commented on it, and then a reply came.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That was three replies, actually, building on the argument, all of them generated by AI. And I was like, wait a minute. Did I misread that? So I read the first post again. I went, ⁓ sure enough. That was arguing for the use of AI in these particular fields. Point I was like, ⁓ no, I don't think so, because based on my own understanding of the technology, limited as it might be. And then But I wasn't quite sure why, right? I I just knew I didn't feel right. And then my first impulse was to go to AI, right? To take the argument, feed it into AI and get a and then I was not well that that's just that's just repeating the problem, right? So that was when I get a pen and a p and a pad and I started writing down the argument as I saw it and understood it so I could work it out. Like and if my first impression was that it was self-refuting. Right. You you can't say, well, use an AI by using the AI, right? But that wasn't really it. It was something a little bit deeper than that. And it turned out that it wa that the argument was making a claim and then providing evidence that undermined the claim that it was making. You know, it's we can't get this We this information doesn't exist and then all of a sudden you start providing examples of that information that you just said doesn't exist. So I went, All right, that's one of those arguments that falls into what in my own research I've called premature coherence. You know, like you get into an AI, you give it a half baked idea, and it comes out y it not only comes out fully baked, but the cake is decorated with candles on it. Right. And I you know, and and
speaker-0: Here.
speaker-1: In my own research and trying to understand how to use AI productively, I've called it premature coherence because I'm not ready to say that those things actually do belong together in the same argument. You know, but it does Right. All right. So that was what I thought about that post, but I I didn't quite know how to bring that up again. A few days later Someone apparently had on April Fool's Day, they had gone ahead and they had gone into their AI and they just had the AI create some goofy argument, right? And they posted it on LinkedIn as a joke, right? Hey, it's April Fool's. Let's have a little fun. Well, apparently what happened, and I hadn't seen it, but ⁓ several people commented on the post of how brilliant and insightful and all this th was. And it the person who did it as a joke Right. Obviously it's like, whoa, wait a minute. I this wasn't the reaction that I was expecting.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: Those two things together just made something snap in my head and I was a you know what, I gotta turn this thing off. I'm done.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I can't because every time I go into LinkedIn, there's a series of articles. ⁓ this person's making a post on ⁓ AI writing and they think it's bad. This person's making a post on AI writing why you should rely on it. Or why it's not such a bad thing and this and this and then everybody and and then and all of a sudden like my critical The critic that lives in my head is really active looking at everybody's name and these made up job titles, you know, as some AI innovation digma governance theorist thing, whatever yeah. And and half the time I'm reading it and I'm going, You're not reading the same stuff that I am. You know. And then I just had to walk away. And then it was like I went analog life. I I started grabbing physical books, hardly, you know, turned on the iPad or the laptop, just you know, every once in a while I would, you know, still get an idea and come Google something, or even go to my outlier which has all those different AI models that I can use for free. And, you know, go in with a question, get the AI summary, sil filter out the sacophysie and all that, and then walk away and go think again.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: I was sitting outside the other day. Well, on one of the nice days before it got chilly again. And there was these two young teenage girls, not fourteen, fifteen, right around there, walking through the and they both got their cell phones up, right? And they're both staring at the phone. ⁓ They're barely talking to each other, but you know, they are I can see that their mouths are moving and they're nodding. So I know that they're they're actually talking to each other about whatever they're looking at on their phone.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And then it when they get to the corner, you know, by the basketball court there. And then ⁓ they turn around and now they're walking back to the way they came. And at one point they stopped, both of them deeply engrossed in their phone, neither one of them saying anything. And they stood there for a good two, three minutes. Neither one of them moving. You know, the head down, you know the look. Right? And then, you know
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: The one girl looks up and then the says something and then they start walking again. And I was like, Yeah, this isn't good in my head, right? Like that's not good. They just to you're walking around. You can't leave your phone at home or in your pocket and just talk to each other. Right. And so you know, and then I'm like, ⁓ okay, I got this. Then this book is like I I already mentioned that I wanted to talk about it. And so it's like
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: We're we're immersed in this stuff. And and then the other thing that got me on to I needed to take like an analog break, you know, like a serious analog break, was when I would turn on like YouTube to watch some of the videos of the people that I follow, the weather, you know, those weather geeks that I just get a and then the you know, like the political commentary and that, that I just try to, you know, stay up on what's happening in the world. And nearly every person that I watched over the period of a couple of days had this, they're exhausted. Right. Trying to produce all this content all the time. And then I got to thinking, Yeah. If you're trying I what do you think, Mark? I mean, one of the I I mean, part of the the conceit of our little podcast thing here is we're only doing it once a week. Right. And we're not trying to comment on current events. Well no, I mean we'll talk about something that's happening, but not ⁓
speaker-0: It's not a political commentary news show. Right.
speaker-1: Or anything, you know, or a cultural commentary news show. ⁓ this happened, right? Because every day there are things that are happening everywhere. Right? And if you need to comment on every single thing that happens in your area of interest, yeah, you're exhausted. You know, I I I talk I I'm I I don't want to mention names, but there was that one young man originally from New Jersey, he's living out in California now, and I started watching his broadcast political commentary back during COVID. And ⁓ at the time, ninety percent of his broadcast he was in a shirt and tie. Right, jack, shirt and tie. And occasionally, you know, like business casual. And, you know, the thing was I don't do ads, I don't take sponsorships, I'm independent, independent, independent. Right. Well now, a few years later, with a couple of books published and ⁓ appearances on the mainstream media, now you turn I I tune in a podcast and he's got the ball cap on backwards, looks like he just got out of the gym with the white t shirt, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, and he's doing ads and sponsorships. Right. Okay. That the medium captures you. Right.
speaker-0: You get Yeah, like at what at what point do you stop being yourself and you start being the algorithm? Because like you said, you're trying, or like Lee Siegel said, you're trying to be more like everybody than anybody, right? So that's what's popular, casual, right? Like that's what's popular now. If the internet was 40 years ago, a suit and tie would have been fresh, you know, right? Whereas now
speaker-1: You you fit yourself into the mold. And and so by doing that, now you get and this is why, you know, it's like it's it's useful to me to have the the memory, right, of this. Because now you have you see commentaries on the performance of authenticity.
speaker-0: Right, exactly.
speaker-1: You're not being authentic. You're performing authenticity.
speaker-0: Right. You're acting authentic.
speaker-1: Yeah. You're acting authentic in order to draw people to you because ⁓ we're all tired of the phoniness. Right? Performance. You're performing something instead of just being, you know, who you are or whatever. All right.
speaker-0: Yeah. And because of the way the internet works and especially more specifically social media, it's like your identity becomes the performance and your your brand. I think he mentions brand too, you know, in there. Instead of just being a person, now you're a brand online.
speaker-1: Mm-hmm. And then now you've got brand management. Right? You're not being authentic, right? And that, you know, the electronic mob, right? Remaining hum being human in the age of the electronic mob. Because well, all right, Mark, we have we have our little YouTube channel and our podcast. And when you go to YouTube Studio, you look at the stats.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And if you're metrics driven, which our modern society is, what do you do? ⁓ well, that video, that topic a lot, you know, people engage with that. So we're gonna do more of that.
speaker-0: Did well.
speaker-1: Now you're captured because as soon as you step out of that, well but where is the capture? We're not captured right now. Why? Because we only have we have less than two hundred and fifty subscribers. We're not making money at this.
speaker-0: So we haven't passed that threshold of are we going to become the algorithm?
speaker-1: Right. Are we go now and that's a question that we we're going to have to face at some point, if ⁓ assuming that, you know, anybody actually finds this interesting. Something happened outside?
speaker-0: That actually so do I guess it brings up a question. Yeah. Do you think that all these people like know like content creators and all the do you think they know what's happening or do you think they're doing it subconsciously?
speaker-1: I the people that I'm that I've noticed over the last couple of weeks, these are people that know what's happening to them. Right. They they they feel it. Right? Because there's a coup generally ⁓ beyond the like the weather geeks and a couple of the the the general progressive center left YouTube, you know, ⁓ news commentary, legal and news commentary that I I pay attention. Mo any other my other ⁓ YouTube usage is generally over in the ⁓ the YouTube philosophers, right? And you know, where they're trying they'll explain or they'll give their take on Plato's Republic or Nietzsche's genealogy of morals or Foucault or whatever. Or, you know, like lectures. Yeah, like actual university lectures. There's that that great guy ⁓ If you're ever interested in like postmodern theory, there's this guy, he's from the s he's from the deep south somewhere. His name is I think it's Rick Roderick. He's got that that great Southern accent, but he's talking about like derrida and Foucault and and all that. It it's just interesting to hear it with that deep southern accent. But ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: But that's that's where I spend most of my time, right? So I'm not seeing but these some of these like online philosophers, they're you they're exhausted. Because they they on the one hand, they want to do what their education, getting you know, chasing their PhDs down prepared them to do. ⁓ but on the other hand, they're fighting against the demands of the algorithm.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Whether they're going you know, how much longer they're gonna be able to produce content and that kind of stuff, I don't know. But you can see the struggle, you know, in some of them. At least I can, you know, where they're they're trying to, you know, speak about the things that matter to them, at the same time present it in a way that is quote unquote accessible.
speaker-0: Sorry, was that a question or
speaker-1: Well, it was an opening for you to give me a chance to take a sip of my coffee.
speaker-0: Yeah, I sorry you just get on a roll sometime.
speaker-1: I d yeah well yeah, I know. you're used to meeting
speaker-0: I didn't know where to interject and then you just randomly stopped. It felt So I guess like I think the I mean, I had a question that I wrote down but I kinda more that I think about it don't really I think it is a problem. It's a in los is losing trust in experts a problem or a correction.
speaker-1: Okay. So what do you think?
speaker-0: Well it I don't think that you should necessarily like blindly trust anybody because even somebody that's an expert could be wrong, right? So I mean, that's one of the reasons why like I tend I like science in the sense that it's not just like one expert. It's like a bunch of people doing independent studies all over here and there and they are all coming to the same conclusions. Right. ⁓ So I don't you know, there should 'cause what is that? Isn't that a fa appeal to authority?
speaker-1: It is a it is an informal fallacy, appeal to a
speaker-0: Just trust somebody just because they're an expert.
speaker-1: Well, in other words, the in one of the things you see, and this happens in the in the pseudoscience thing, right? So in other words, let's just say that you have a PhD in ⁓ American history.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: And you're well respected, not you know, y you didn't just you know, you didn't get your PhD and become a hack. You know, you you got it and you're a well respected historian.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Does that give you the right or does that give you should I defer to you if you offer me an opinion on economics?
speaker-0: Necessarily, or probably not, because I don't know what well like what it
speaker-1: To the extent that a historian of American history would have paid attention to the American economy. Yeah. Again, historian and economist, they're different things. So if you're depending on Dr. Mark, the historian, for economic
speaker-0: Maybe, yeah. Two different things.
speaker-1: history, you might be making a mistake. Right. You might it me maybe Dr. Mark says something about economics, right? That that sounds right to me. And I trust him because I've been following his historical work and he's not and he's he's solid. Right. Now if I just run with your opinion on
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: economics at that point, I'm probably committing that fallacy of appeal to authority, or I'm using you to beat somebody up. ⁓ no, you're wrong because Mark says. Right? But now if I take that and then I I go, I take, you know, Dr. Mark's economic opinion, and maybe I go and I compare it to Joe Stiglitz, a noble laureate in economics. ⁓ okay. And if he
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: seems to be saying the same thing. ⁓ okay. Now my appeal to you is not wrong necessarily. Right. But if I appeal to Dr. Mark the historian to confirm something about quantum mechanics.
speaker-0: Because the
speaker-1: Yeah, and you know, but this is the thing, y you know, and ⁓ we're busy. You know, you see an article, it says, you know, Mark Cipolla, PhD. ⁓ okay, well he's got a PhD, that means ⁓ you know, whatever but no, because the PhD is focused.
speaker-0: ⁓ It's it's the part of those mental shortcuts. Right.
speaker-1: Nobody has a PhD in everything. As far nobody has a PhD in everything as far as I know.
speaker-0: Well, and I I would I almost feel like that probably even started like before like the internet was super big 'cause like, you know, you have like these news channels, you know, once news became entertainment, you have all these news channels that's just having all these experts arguing about I don't even know if you're an expert in the thing that we're talking about here. You're you're an expert
speaker-1: You know, you just you y you have people that are on there that are yelling at each other, offering different opinions, you're trying to sort through it, and it and in especially in modern life, it's all tribal signaling anyway. It's hardly it's not really designed to generate any real insight or understanding. Right? You're just scoring points. Day for my team, you know, kinda thing. one
speaker-0: Right, which is Yeah.
speaker-1: That's kind we're we're talking about expertise and stuff and and how the media environment has changed. And I don't know if you remember Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner. No, you don't remember. All right, that's that's before your time. But anyway, there was that Gilda Radner, she's extraordinarily funny woman, died of I think ⁓ breast cancer or something like that, far too young. but at any rate, one of the the skits on Saturday Night Live was her going on to offer these editorial replies where she would mistake you know, say and this was part of like the the media environment of the time. Because news was news. It wasn't like it is today. It wasn't like opinion shows. Right. So if someone had an opinion, they would write an editorial, submit it to the station, and then at the end of the news broadcast, they would give that, you know, this person a couple of minutes to read their opinion. And then ⁓ the fairness doctrine that was enforced at the time required the station then to provide equal time for a rebuttal.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. And the Gilda Radnett thing was she would come up to do these rebuttals and then they would explain to her that she misunderstood the point and she would always end, ⁓ never mind. That was the joke. Yeah. And it was funny because there was that
speaker-0: That was happening.
speaker-1: that we ⁓ that we all lived in. We knew that that was the way things work. So that's what made it funny. You know, you to show that skit to people today and they wouldn't understand what the hell they w like what is right, 'cause they don't have that that frame of reference.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: You know, so where do you find your experts? Right. And then then you get into, you know, then this draws into some of the postmodern critiques of, you know, well, who qualifies as an expert? Right? You know, and you you go, ⁓ well, because this person went to that university and did all these things, now you decide that they're the person that knows more than I do. Right. And one of the consequences of the internet. that I I'd have to find it I ⁓ in the book. I don't have my post-it notes. I wasn't sure if you were gonna be ready or not. so ⁓ but one of the things that he he he talks about in here is you know how to find you know the expert. And you know, that my opinion is just as good as your facts. No. You know, because what happens to you I know that one of the things that you do when you're bored on like you're doing ⁓ Grubhub, right? And you're bored, right? So you're sitting there waiting for an order, so you open up TikTok and you're just scrolling through TikTok. Is there anything that's actually useful in that feat? Do you ever learn anything or is it just killing time?
speaker-0: Most of the time it's probably just gilling killing time because in a lot of a lot of the videos are that internet arguing. It's like this person made a video, now this person's d debunking that video and this person's debunking and then it's just, you know, it starts becoming B so the point is is most of the time it's like a w it's either purely entertainment, like it's funny or whatever, cool, you know. It's People arguing on the internet, which I would say is like a waste of time because usually you're not You're not really talking about like it'll be, you know, you'll bring up a news story, right? And it's like you're talking around the issue instead of talking about the actual issue, so that's a waste of time. You know, or it's just outrage. It's just stuff that's pissing me off. Yeah. You know. So I try to curb it, but it's like, you know.
speaker-1: Yeah. So But now here here's the thing that I've been noticing, right? And and again one of the reasons why I like this r resonated with me, right? It's because like I've been noticing the way that I feel. You know, I I've gotten to the point where in my own recovery where I'm now I'm doing the somatic, those r trauma release exercises. Right. And because whatever. But the I notice how I feel more often. So like I I'll even when I watch, like, okay, I'll turn on one of my political commentators. And maybe that's a twenty five minute video, right? Where he's talking about the war, whatever. And by the end of it, I'm agitated.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: All right, hold on a second. So turn the TV up or walk away from the computer, turn the iP you know, the iPad down, and just get away from YouTube. And then I'm like, why am I agitated? ⁓ okay, because there's nothing I can do about this thing that they just told me about. Right? It upsets me that it's happening, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: So I have an option I can jump into the comment section on the video, right? And and have something to say or So from a a personal management standpoint, I'm that's what I'm trying to do is like, all right, notice how I feel, then walk away from it. All right, walk away, walk away. ⁓ it'cause the the the combination of like all of this noise on LinkedIn, I'm trying to sort through it so I can find somebody that'll give me a job or allow me to earn some money. ⁓ And then, you know, I YouTube and all this stuff and and and then you know, walking around outside trying to go, you know, now that the weather's getting nicer and I can get back outside again, ⁓ you know, walking around and and trying to find someone to engage with and everybody's you know, staring at their phone.
speaker-0: Yeah. Even if they're not staring at their that's what I was gonna say, even if they're not staring at their phone, they got headphones in, so it's like, you know
speaker-1: Yeah, you go you know, or you go to say something to them and then you realize that they got headphones on. ⁓ my god, ⁓ forget it. You know, I'm not gonna talk to this person either. And so they're all living in their little this this little world and then there are a lot of other peripheral things that that that people are talking about.
speaker-0: Did you ever this is really way off topic, but Sure. It just did you ever see those pic there was like a photographer, ⁓ some artist basically took a bunch of pictures of people, like, you know, at the park, at the dinner table and blah, blah, blah. And then he like removed the phones out of the picture. I
speaker-1: Now I heard about that. I actually I haven't seen the pictures, but I did hear that someone had done something like that.
speaker-0: It's even reminding me because it's like you, you know, you're talking about the the young girls walking with their phones, like, you know, and even, you know, my son or stepson is like constantly, you know, he's walking down the stairs looking at his phone. It's like, bro, you'd be able to walk down the stairs faster if you just paid attention to what you're doing, you know, instead of walking around with the phone. But it's like
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: There's kind of the I don't know, like w with all this that I've learned about the the addictiveness of this technology because it's like the idea, like they do it like this on purpose, right? 'Cause they want us to be staring at it 'cause the more we stare at it, that equals dollar signs for them.
speaker-1: Yeah, well that they they call it the attention economy. Right. In two thousand eight, when this book was written, that was not that wasn't a thing. But now it is the attention economy. And interestingly enough, many of the architects of this technology, you know, the stickiness of it and all that are now making the rounds on the podcast going, that was bad, we should have done it.
speaker-0: A thing, yeah. Well yeah, it's like you It's like distributing a drug to the masses and then being like after everyone's all drug addicts, you're like, Oops, my bad. Like I didn't
speaker-1: Well all right, if you didn't know
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Right. If you didn't know it was addictive. Right. But you know, the thing that and interestingly enough, I I have to make the comparison when I was when I was start I picked the book up again to flip through it, which is why I'm I might sound a little less sure of certain things than I than I might be. ⁓
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: But I was flipping through it and one of the things that he notes in the introduction of the book was he makes this comparison to the automobile industry. Right. Like the when the automobile you know, automobiles were new and they were marketed marvels of convenience and d you know, all this stuff. And they were hurdling death traps, right? For a whole bunch of reasons. Seat belts, ⁓ there were lots of chrome, you know. So the sun would hit it, you're blinded, you know, you don't have mirrors where you need ⁓ you can't see things. And but yet the auto industry all ⁓ there's nothing we can do, nothing we can do, nothing we can do until nineteen sixty five when Ralph Nader published his book Unsafe at Any Speed.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well also yeah, you're
speaker-1: And they realized then it was like, ⁓ yeah, we knew our engineers had been telling us this stuff for years, but for profit. Mm-hmm. Right.
speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Capitalism.
speaker-1: Well, yeah. You're letting your color show again, Mark. But ⁓ and so then changes were made. Right. And so his thesis is that and then well you could also make the comparison to the tobacco industry as well. That they knew A that the product was addictive and B that it was deadly.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: Right. So they they, you know, buried the it's deadly, you know. ⁓ it's not really addictive, it's a choice. Right. And then but eventually, you know, the the preponderance of evidence finally comes out and off you go. So Siegel's point is that the internet, at least in the at the time he was writing, was being promoted in much the same way that automobiles were.
speaker-0: You choose to spend
speaker-1: It's just a marvel of convenience and and all this great stuff and no consideration at all of any harms that might accrue as a result of that. And some of the things that he writes about or he wrote about here as this might happen actually seems like it actually did happen. Right? You know, as like the amount of disinformation, for example.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right.
speaker-1: and the speed at which it spreads. And then th this is where I get into all kinds of trouble though, because I'm like there I have so many other things that are that I've touched on that I've read or that are in the pile of things that I need to like lock down. I've got the Legos like like placed all next to each other, but now I pick ⁓ up and start snapping them together. And ⁓ part of that is like the way that information moves through these networks.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: And there are tools that are available for that. Like there's this thing called the Media Cloud at MIT, which was used by a couple of authors for a book called Network Propaganda. You know You know, change you know, changing how stories like move through and how they which would be useful for your conspiracy theory thing. You could use it for that, like to find out who said it first and then who picked it up.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: A and that kind of stuff. So Do you are you familiar with the ⁓ the culture of narcissism?
speaker-0: mean I've heard that phrase before but I'm not sure like I mean I know what narcissist is but like
speaker-1: Well, back in I think it was the early nineteen seventies, there was a social critic, Christopher Lash, who wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism. Right. And it it's interesting because when we talk about like well when we talked about Lippmann and Bernays and the propaganda model and all of that, I got I got that door opened to me through the Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self, right? And the rise of the individual and like your needs, what you want is the important thing. And Christopher Lash was commenting on that therapeutic culture. Right? Well, he brings it up here. Where he says Lash believe that all this evasive self obsession, right? So more and more people were writing about their interior lives. As opposed to what's going on in the world, right? Yeah, what's going on and so how ⁓ how do I feel about what's going on?
speaker-0: Yeah. Going on the side mile. Right.
speaker-1: But he says it drove people further into themselves and it created an inner emptiness by exalting the self and cutting it off from reality. Right. Now is that what Siegel is saying in this book is that Lash's observations from the nineteen seventies are now actually manifesting in the world because he's saying, Well, I read Lash's book and now I'm looking at this internet culture of the early aughts and this is what he's seeing. Right. Right. Now. Does that make sense to you? Do you think that that's Part of what we're seeing today.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, 'cause it's like like you said, your online identity is is all it's you, it's your ego, it's your brand, so it's narcissistic in a way, like right. Is that what you mean?
speaker-1: But now here here's the thing, right? Think about like you were you mentioned a little while ago, like on TikTok, like a lot of a lot of what you see is all right, maybe me, right? You're scrolling through, up, there's Doug, and Doug's got a little two minute riff on some stupid thing that some politician said. Yeah. Right. And then the next video is Someone commenting on Doug's comment on what that politician said. Right. And then someone the next video was someone commenting on the comment on the comment on Doug's video. Right. Kind of thing. And nobody really cares about anybody else's opinion.
speaker-0: Well, it's it's yeah, it's all a lot of it to me, i it's performative, it's distracting, and it almost feels distracting, like as if it's the point, you know, like a a perfect example of that is you may or may not have heard, ⁓ but there was CNN did a piece on this like rape academy. ⁓ okay. Anyways, there is a adult website, right, that apparently had a a subsection of videos where it was women that were sleeping. And apparently these were like real, not like actors. And then there was a whole group chat where Men were trading secrets on how to rape their wives. How to drug them and there was a whole story where this guy basically had his ⁓ what I think what sparked the in i investigation or whatever was there was this guy basically had his wife raped by like over seventy guys. He would just drug her and then anyways, 'cause men are pieces of shit. I Not all men, but all men. I'll just say it. Just like people are stupid. So anyways, that it's really it's a lot. Like men are I know I'm a man, but men are terrible. And but anyways, my point in bringing that up is
speaker-1: ⁓ I w I'm gonna we'll push but we'll have to we'll have to talk about that one.
speaker-0: Yeah, but the point of me bringing it up is because what I've been seeing on TikTok is exactly what you just described. So there's numbers that are involved, you know, how many website hits that this website has, how many videos there are, and how many people were actually in this telegram group, right? And all of those numbers are different. You know, it's like sixty-two million. website hits twenty thousand videos on whatever bad bad things and a thousand or two thousand whatever was people in this group chat, right? That's all the conversations that I've been seeing are about. It's about you're spreading misinformation. You're trying to protect, you're trying to defend men. You're trying to, and it's like these back and forth of people just commenting on the numbers and whether or not you're spreading misinformation and all this stuff. And it's like, like you said, you're we're not talking about the actual issue. We're talking about
speaker-1: And yeah, well jeez.
speaker-0: Yeah, I know that was a really trigger warning, late a late trigger warning case, but it it's that's just what's been on my TikTok feed for like the past week, basically. You know, because I think the article came out in late March, but the the TikTok algorithm and everything started talking about it a few days ago. But anyways, yeah, on that horrible note, ⁓ we've been going for like an hour. So ⁓ you know, one of the good things,
speaker-1: You need to warn me about shit like that.
speaker-0: Sorry. Yeah, I should have been warned when I
speaker-1: How I feel about men abusing women.
speaker-0: It's no, yeah, I know. It's you know. It's the worst fucking excuse me, worst thing ever. ⁓
speaker-1: You know, I mean the other day I mean
speaker-0: Yeah, you don't even want to hear the other stories that I've heard that led to that, but No No, I don't. ⁓ but anyways, that's been
speaker-1: I no something I gotta say before we we end this. Right. There's been a lot of I I I've seen it, a lot of these, you know, ⁓ supposed saviors of the young boys, right? You know, talking about, you know, how the left is losing men or the rights gaining men and all this political bullshit. Right.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: If there's a man, a sh a male that's listening to me right now.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That woman that you're looking at is a human being. First and foremost. First and foremost, she's got desires and needs and wants just like
speaker-0: First and foremost. Yeah. I like the the the idea that the like the way you would feel if a gay man like a straight man, the way you would feel if a gay man just came up to you and started doing stuff, whether it's being overly flirtatious or just think about that.
speaker-1: Yeah, you're you're okay, yeah, that's a good one, Mark. You're a straight man and you know, a gay guy comes up, l thinks you're hot, and all of a sudden his hand's down your pants. You know, and you on the neck. You don't like that, then you damn well better never fucking do it to a woman.
speaker-0: If you don't if you can't come Right.
speaker-1: Right. And I'm tired of hearing about what it takes to be a man. And if you think that being a man means not having respect for other human beings that you don't approve of, then you need to read a different book. Find somebody different to talk to. Seventy five.
speaker-0: Right for humans are the first. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ on that, like I said, terrible note. thanks for joining us. ⁓ we'll try to not end on such a we had a good conversation. Hold on, hold on. But ⁓ just with the internet, everyone has a voice. Not everyone has something that should be heard, but you know, there's that. And ⁓ once again, this has been episode thirty six of Occasionally Philosophical. I don't know if we learned anything, but we did ask questions and we ⁓ hopefully we gave you something to think about, you know, maybe talk about on your next car ride. and ⁓ yeah, ⁓ with you know, all the stuff. We got a Patreon now. It's gonna be linked in the the the merch store. We gotta go fund me going for you. listen to our podcasts on all the things, you know, Spotify, all that fun stuff. yeah, I guess that's all the the business end of the stuff. So do you have any closing statements or thoughts? something other
speaker-1: No. ⁓ I was going to try to find something a little bit more uplifting, but all my all my comic books are in the other room. ⁓ yeah, I I again ⁓ thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us. ⁓ when it comes to you and me have to have a talk about the stuff that you're gonna bring up. You d you need to let me know when you're gonna hit me with something like
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ but anyway, thank you for joining us. ⁓ we did the we did the you know, if you like the conversation, click like. If you didn't like it, click on you know, you didn't like it, offer us a comment that as much as we complain about the algorithmic control of our lives, ⁓ in order for you to stay current with whatever the kid and I are trying to figure out, you need to, you know, click like, comment so that the algorithm will bring our stuff to your attention. Or you can pay attention to something else that's gonna be considerably less interesting.
speaker-0: Yeah. Right. All right. Anyways. I didn't say that, did I? Yeah.
speaker-1: All right. Until next week. All right.
