How to Fix Social Media

Organizador de Víajes de Expiria.

Vives to have propriety opinion on

it.

Vivimos para yo darten contrado unugar con alberca y playa.

Expivia.

Vivimos para viajar.

2018 was a rough year for some of us.

The already angry medium of the offline world can feel even angrier on social media.

After the early promise of digital communities uniting the world, many of them have become digital disunities instead.

On this week's show, can we make our social lives positive again?

If so,

how?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Happy New Year, listeners!

Welcome to the first Radio Atlantic of the year.

I am once again Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic, and I have got a few surprises in store for you this episode.

And let me get right to the first.

My guest, Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic staff writer and one of the world's smartest writers and thinkers on the past and future of technology.

Mr.

Madrigal, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Matt.

So we are convened today to talk about our problematic platforms.

Maybe first and foremost, Twitter,

possibly because it's the one one that I use the most.

But I think the discussion that I want to have with you, Alexis, encompasses more than just Twitter.

I think it's Facebook, it's YouTube, Netflix, possibly all of the technological things that we currently call platforms.

And one of the reasons I'm excited to have this conversation with you, Alexis Madrigal, is your particular history with technology.

I remember that moment when you came from Wired after

covering technology as a reporter and writer for Wired

and started the Atlantic tech section here.

I was not yet working at the Atlantic.

I was then merely a happy, joyous customer of The Atlantic's work.

And I remember the moment the tech channel started and it was like this totally different

approach to covering technology.

And I remember how exciting that was.

This was in the blogging era.

And so a lot of the big then outlets that were covering tech or were thought of as like tech coverage vehicles were like TechCrunch and Gizmodo and

Wired, of course.

And you brought this sensibility that totally fused the idea of technology with the idea of the Atlantic, which was

you really infused the coverage that you assigned and ran and wrote on the site with this deep sense of history.

And I really appreciated that lens all at once.

It felt like before you came to the Atlantic Tech, a lot of the technology coverage that I had access to was coverage really of things that were being made.

And

the coverage, the lens that you brought to our technology coverage at that moment was sort of more how things have gotten made over time.

And it felt like that lens was deeply infused by the fact that you had just finished writing, publishing, and publicizing your book, Powering the Dream, a history of green technology in America.

And you had dived into the history of our

green, clean energy future going back to like the 19th century, right?

And it felt like you were so rooted in that long expanse of history that by the time you got here and started running our coverage of technology, you were able to cover these stories appropriately

as though the new things that we invent, the new tools, are not departures from the long record of the technology that we've made, but actually just part of that long record.

that they're often just evolutions of the ways that we've been making tools and the tools that we've been making for a long time.

Is that fair?

That's totally fair.

I mean,

what happens, I think, with any book project,

and particularly one like that that covered so many periods of history, is you end up kind of having to go deep into not just the history of like a particular kind of technology, but like sort of all technology.

And, you know, so I was really immersed in this kind of field, academic field, science and technology studies.

And a lot of that field is devoted to not like sort of deconstruction, like a train doesn't exist, exist, but sort of what are the possibilities that exist

for putting a machine on a track and moving it around.

Like, if you look at the German railroad system that develops in the 19th century versus the American railroad system that develops in the 19th century, like what do we learn?

Does a train always look like the train that we saw in like the Transcontinental Railroad, or can it look like a bunch of different things?

Can different configurations of society,

economics, and technical possibility generate a bunch of different outcomes?

Or is there really just one path?

Are things more deterministic than it sounds?

And in my book, like the big example of this is more around the internal combustion engine

and the idea that the energy density of petroleum products is just so good

that it makes it kind of impossible to imagine a a world in which electric vehicles won in the late 19th century.

On the other hand,

there were attempts to build other kinds of systems that didn't require the kinds of road networks and

sort of infrastructures of mobility that we did build around the car.

And so, you know, I think just that's as a small example, like literally everything in the world, like every human-made thing, you can tell certain stories like that around.

And that is what scholars have been doing.

And when I showed up at The Atlantic, I was like bursting with thousands of those stories, which I had been squirreling away when I couldn't write about them because I was working on a book.

And

I think that that style

was really useful at that time when social media companies

had the mantle of progress so firmly upon their shoulders.

And it allowed me to think about other types of technologies that have assumed that kind of mantle, whether it was

radio, whether it was the personal computer in the 1980s, whether it was nuclear technology in the 1950s, and to kind of just peel away, chip away,

you know, pour some solvent on the mantle of progress and see what was underneath.

And I think that's why a lot of our coverage of the platforms early on

was more complex than, oh, this is great.

It gives everyone a voice.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that is interesting about this moment is,

so we're in this kind of epic backlash moment against almost anything that we have come to call a platform, right?

Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Google.

Twitter, Facebook, all of them have come under this massive horde of criticism

because these feel in some ways, I think, to some users and critics of the services like short-sighted, profit-driven, attention-grubbing, advertising-owned

machines for stealing people's attention from them.

Is that a fair characterization of the backlash?

Yeah, as well as, you know, inciting violence or amping up social, antisocial tendencies, destabilizing democratic structures and destroying valuable institutions without adequately replacing them.

Yeah, you know, there's kind of a litany of things that

can be recited.

But I agree that the backlash...

For most people, I actually think the backlash is more personal and psychological

than it is sociological.

But people can attack freely, myself included, between those kind of two levels of analysis.

Like, how does this make me feel versus what is this doing to the world?

Yeah.

Now, I have a question for you.

Are the criticisms that we're applying to technology actually displaced criticisms of society?

You know how there's this thing with like the internet, where when the internet was becoming a popular thing,

a lot of the criticisms that people applied to it were like the same criticisms that Neil Postman, the cultural critic and author of the book Amusing Ourselves to Death,

presaged would happen with the popularization of television.

That

it was this hugely visual medium that had certain tendencies and wants.

And that those tendencies and wants could be really destructive to society.

Does it feel like we're in a sort of similar place with the platforms and what we call them?

Yeah, I mean, and I think it makes sense that our criticism of the internet would be criticisms of the society we live in because like these technologies are embedded inside that society.

So when the

platforms are the beneficiaries

of inequality and you see that, you know, Amazon pays its workers X and the CEO is worth Y,

Like, of course, that criticism is really a criticism about the nature of the American economy and the way that it has distributed money.

And then, of course, like the capture of government that allows things like that

to be and, in fact, encourages them and

a lot of thinking.

And so

I think it makes a ton of sense.

And I think, you know,

maybe the implicit criticism within that question is like, is that really fair?

If they're just sort of operating by society's rules, like, why are we blaming them?

And I think that there is,

maybe that's an unfair restatement, but I would actually say that that's...

that is a fair criticism what's happening in the technological world right now.

But it's also that the platforms are a viable place to get some political pressure on the system.

Because by concentrating so much of the economy, so much attention,

so much advertising,

so much of what's happening in public life in one place, they actually create a really great target for activism.

So I want to an activist that can say, like, let's make this a problem that this exists like this.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So that leads me, I think, to two arguments,

which actually feel pretty exciting to me.

Because what you just...

said,

which I totally agree with, I mean, it feels right,

is that in some ways, the problems that have been made visible with the platforms are just the problem of all of a sudden 2 billion people in the world being able to speak to any one of the other 2 billion people

on this particular internet world at once.

Like, we have problems of people interacting in large crowds on the best of days in like physical public.

And it seems not at all surprising to me that people would have a hard time navigating an environment where there's just like no easy filter between them and like 1.9999999999999 billion other people.

Yeah.

Can I address that one just before you go on to your next one?

I mean, I think

one thing that I have been

I've been making a counter argument to myself to kind of just like stress test, you know?

And it kind kind of goes like this, that

we assume that the problems that result from a thing like Twitter, and I've made arguments like this myself, that the structure of like retweeting on Twitter has particular social outcomes or encourages particular social outcomes.

And so that means that a lot of the decisions that the platforms make are really significant and that we should blame them specifically for a lot of these things.

And then, you know, I started to think about a lot of the problems that Facebook was encountering with WhatsApp in different parts of the world.

And like WhatsApp basically is encrypted text messaging.

That's it.

That's what it is, you know?

And it doesn't rely on an advertising model.

It doesn't.

It doesn't do the same things with data that Facebook, Instagram do.

It doesn't have the same kind of intentionally public and public swaying features of a Twitter.

Like it just has none of the same features.

And yet, like, all the same criticisms are being leveled against WhatsApp.

And so I started to think to myself, like, well, does that just mean, like, to your point, that this is just,

we're seeing essentially the pollution, the externalities, the like bad stuff that comes with more people being connected.

And if you go back and you look at what people were saying when SMS started to roll out, when text messaging started to

become a mainstream

tool, if not totally ubiquitous, particularly in other parts of the world,

what we find is that people were making the same criticisms of SMS.

And I think what that has pushed me back, the position that that has pushed me into, is thinking like, yes, we should make these specific critiques, but I think we also need to consider

this broad idea that like, are we willing to throw out the level of connectivity that we have?

And if we're not willing to throw it out for ourselves,

Should we be encouraging companies to make that kind of connectivity less available in other places in the world, which is an argument that lots of people are making right now.

So it's a really, really interesting

thing that I feel like there's a baby bathwater kind of

situation.

I prefer to use the term infant liquid juice.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah, exactly.

It's really,

I'm like,

I've found myself in a very uncomfortable place around this, I would say, over the last six months.

And I don't feel fully resolved about it.

But it's something that I feel like my mind, I can feel my mind trying to find a new orientation towards this set of problems as a result of kind of this line of thinking and thinking about how people thought about SMS.

Well, let us pause for a moment and then come back to explore that new line of thinking after this message.

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Let us continue with the completely unironic insertion of advertising before this next phase of our conversation, Alexis.

I want to make a straight-up argument about technology and the way that it's interacting with society at this moment.

And I wanted to

lob a premise at your way.

So can we stipulate that the making of any tool is actually a collaborative exercise between the people who design that tool, the people who pay for that tool, and the people who primarily use it?

Is that fair?

So like Twitter is made in part by the company, Twitter Incorporated, in part by the companies that advertise on Twitter.

and the market that Twitter is embedded in, and also, of course, the scads and scads of people who use Twitter.

And the thing that I really wanted to ask you, Alexis, was who do you think actually has the most power in this equation?

And before you answer, I want to confess that I've got a side in this argument.

And I think my answer is that users, that users might have the most power in this equation, that both collectively on that scale and individually, I think that we users might have more power to shape the platforms that we use than we give ourselves credit for.

But I want to leave that argument there and ask your just first thoughts to that.

Well, I think that there's a question of sort of like latent and actual power.

I think that there's probably more latent power in the users.

Like if all the users started to do a certain thing, then that could work.

I think that when we think about this, though, we need to think about kind of the question of organization and whether there is meaningful organization between Twitter users to act on their own behalf or not.

And I think the answer answer to that is no.

And that

there aren't really means.

There's no mechanisms for Twitter users to really exert power.

And, you know, we left out another group, which is shareholders, the people who own the company who are also different from the management.

And I would say, in some ways, that would be the group that I would tend to think

could exert the most power, both in the sense that they have large amounts of latent power and they actually have a means for doing it.

On the other hand, they wouldn't know what to do.

I mean, I think the main problem that we have here, Matt, is that no one knows what to do to fix these problems.

And I actually think that includes the companies and the users.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Now, what you've described to me sounds like a basic

almost geopolitical governance problem.

And it sounds not at all dissimilar from the problems that we talk about every day about America and its design and some of the places where its design might be actually democratically, deeply dissatisfying to many of its, shall we say, users.

That

the government of the platforms feels deeply, highly imperfect.

And there's no unlike the American government, there are fewer, or at least there are less democratic institutions through which users might change that governance and government structure.

Absolutely.

I mean, like, I'll just put out one more thing.

You know, there's a conversation with a guy named Tim Wong and the guy who's the former head of SCIU, the Service Employees Union.

And, you know, one of the things that Tim said was that, you know, because the SCIU guy was basically like, it's amazing, like Uber and Lyft and all of these companies have actually concentrated, they've done half the work of organizing for us by getting all these people onto these platforms as workers, right?

Like they were talking Lyft drivers or Uber drivers, whatever they are.

And he's like, this is like what, like a union organized, this is the best target ever.

You organize this one shop and you got 2 million people, you know?

And I take that as an interesting point.

Tim's point, though, was that in order for that to happen, people have to conceive of themselves as a public or as a, in this case, you know, they have to conceive of themselves as a, as a, as a unit, as having some form of solidarity or cohesion or just like

an identity as workers.

And I've done a lot of work around the ports and dock workers.

And the culture of dock working.

over many decades lent itself to this incredibly dense social network that was very and remains a very powerful organizing tool.

And I think what you look at with something like Twitter is like, there is just nothing like that, you know?

And there never has been on any platform.

There have been little pushes here and there, you know, like, oh, well, like, let's not formalize the retweet.

I mean, I feel like I was part of some of these like organizing efforts, but they all came to nothing, more or less.

And I think we need to recognize that, you know.

Well, so I wanted to actually.

narrow down from this collective we that we've been speaking in, this collective we of users, and speak on that personal scale that you were talking about before.

Because I've been trying this this experiment on twitter um and it has been fascinating to me and i wanted to ask you about it and what it meant um

have you heard about this experiment that i've been doing that i've been calling break the ratio

so you know there's this phenomenon on twitter i don't know who first invented the term to get ratioed um

but the term generally refers to a moment when a twitter mob has descended upon someone who has tweeted something that the twitter mob does not like so um the way that you can identify a tweet that has been deemed bad by the anarchy of Twitter is you count the number of replies to the tweet.

And if the number of replies to the tweet exceed, I believe, the collective number of likes and retweets to the tweet, then the tweet has gotten, quote-unquote, ratioed.

That means that the

quasi-anarchic,

pseudo-democratic entity of Twitter has determined that the ratio tweet is a bad egg.

It's getting booed off stage, basically.

It's getting booed off stage by the broad public that is Twitter.

So I announced to my followers on Twitter right at the start of the year that I wanted to try an experiment called break the ratio.

And the rules, I told my followers, are these.

I'm going to speak my truth.

I'm going to go speak things that I have on my mind into Twitter.

And anyone who follows me on Twitter, of course, may hear them.

And anyone may, like any other tweet on Twitter, retweet them.

My Twitter feed is public.

It's at MTomps.

I will do my thing on Twitter as I have.

However, to the followers...

who want to participate in this break the ratio experiment, I asked them not to like or retweet anything that spoke to them, anything that they felt in any way touched by, whether positively or negatively.

i said please do not like or retweet those things if anything that i say on twitter moves you i asked just reply to me just reply to that tweet

um

you're intentionally ratioing yourself

yes exactly so i asked people to ratio me on twitter

and

alexis it has been years since i had the experience of

not only being delighted to pull up Twitter,

but

actually

waiting for people to tweet things toward me.

For the past several years, my experience of Twitter has been this crazy making

experience of just pulling it up and seeing thousands of people, very few of whom,

a decreasing number of whom I had any idea of the context for, just saying random things into this disorienting fog.

And I found myself increasingly just not liking that.

I found myself wanting a platform where if someone had something to say about something I said, they would say it to me.

So they would ratio me.

And the most extraordinary thing happened when I asked people to ratio my tweets.

I found myself having conversations on Twitter, like with people, with many of whom people that I know, some of whom were people that I didn't know, but who had intelligent and interesting things to tell me.

And then I found myself delighted by the prospect of pulling up Twitter and seeing all of these replies to things.

I gave my followers a promise that if a tweet was ratioed, I would try to respond to that tweet.

I think I promised to respond to that tweet in part.

So, what that looks like for me is when I have like eliminated the quote-unquote home feed of Twitter,

I have eliminated every other feed that is not either a reply to a tweet that I have made

or a mention of a tweet that I have made.

Those are the two things that I see when

I pull up the platform.

And all of a sudden it feels like this tiny corner of Twitter is just speaking to me and I can talk back to them.

And it's like we've got our secret little club.

I mean, of course, by telling Radio Atlantic listeners, I'm telling them that this club exists somewhere.

But it has been a beautiful few days.

I mean, just a week plus, we're not that far into the new year.

It's been a beautiful little while of just like hearing from people their thoughts about my thoughts.

And some of those thoughts are negative and some of those thoughts are positive.

And

they're like human scale thoughts.

And I know that somewhere outside of this, someone might be like retweeting the things that I say, but I don't see any of that anymore.

And I don't really care, in some ways, how far my words travel into the fog.

I

just increasingly care more and more about who's talking to me and what,

how respectfully and lovingly and intelligently I might respond back to them.

I'm curious what you think of that experiment.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's, you, you raise like an interesting question, which is

how can we live with these technologies, even if we sort of like,

you know, play them against the grain or play them in a way that is, you know, unusual.

It kind of reminds me of our like mutual friend

Robin Sloan, who went into this video game.

And instead of, you know, there's no way to talk to people.

So he would just sort of like try and create alliances in a game for which there is no affordance for an alliance.

This This is Fortnite.

To spoil the game.

This is Fortnite.

Fortnite.

Yeah, to spoil the game.

The one rule in the Atlantic about it.

It's great.

There's an awesome story in the Atlantic about it.

We will link to it in the show notes.

The one rule of Fortnite is that when you get dropped into the game, you got to go find the nearest player and start killing them, basically.

Right.

And so Robin decided he wanted to basically play the peaceful version of Fortnite, or at least a collaborative version.

And he had a whole experience that was quite wonderful.

Of course, I hear him playing Fortnite sometimes because we share an office and he's just in there killing people now.

So

that may foreshadow what I'm about to say, which is that I think that we sometimes, I think it's like we underestimate, particularly in this

era,

which I'll reference another book called Age of Fracture, which is a historian's take on sort of how society became considered to be a bunch of little particles making independent decisions on a lot of uh, in a lot of different realms of life, you know, not just the market, but like sort of market thinking extended to like lots of other things.

And I, and to me, it's kind of like that.

Like, sure, could you have your own personal socialism within like a capitalist system?

Could you do, you know,

Twitter co-op?

Yeah, you could do that.

You know what I mean?

Like, you could totally do that.

Um, but, uh, but I

don't know how that translates

into

greater greater change.

And that may be a reflection of my own cynicism, but I also think it's a reflection of how powerful I think the rails are, you know, and that even if you can get off them for a second, like

these

things are very well established.

I mean, my own personal Twitter experiment began like six months ago when I essentially switched to kind of read only and only articles.

So I use a tool called Nuzzle and I basically just read stories that people tweet.

And then around those stories, I'll sometimes read the tweets because this tool captures those as well.

So I'm not like gone from Twitter, but I essentially don't tweet anymore.

And I and I use it as a tool for like seeing what people are talking about and how they're talking about it.

So I'll tell you why that makes me a little sad.

I, like many people who kind of came of media age in the era of blogging, have missed blogging, right?

I don't know if you feel that way.

I totally feel that way.

I totally miss blogging.

I mean, it's not like blogging went anywhere.

It's just that it did not persist as a sort of social activity.

It no longer felt like a norm.

Yeah, it was a genre that fell out of fashion.

Exactly.

Exactly.

A way of writing that no longer is around.

And I still blog, I mean, sometimes.

Probably not in yours, but

I still follow several people who blog, and it's still nice, but it still feels like

we are making

salmon flies in our little niche artisan antiquarian club together

in a cabin.

Yes, it's very butcher shop in the remote wilderness.

But

what was beautiful to me about blogging in the era when that thrived among a subset of internet users as

a way of engaging with the world was

the the notion of this kind of um really generous public-spirited exchange of ideas that

the internet during the blogging era was just this place where you would go to kind of find misfits who fit like you um

and they were talking to you and you could talk to one another.

And if you said interesting things to each other, then

others would say interesting things to you.

And together, collectively, in

your misfit corner of this big old internet,

you could help each other learn things about everything.

That was sort of the magic of blogging.

And I think for me, at least, it was why, it's why I remain so entranced about that moment in the life of the internet and wonder so much about like how that spirit, how I might at least find that spirit again for myself

yeah i think well and i and i i i agree that my way of using twitter is sad like don't get me wrong i totally agree that it's sad i think i think a couple of things that collaborative spirit um became

tied up with the distribution of information in a broader sense.

So I think one of the things that was so interesting about blogging was that it tied together both kind of live processing of the internet in a time before that had been formalized within social media and within news feeds within specific platforms.

But it also became a means of like directing attention around.

And those are actually kind of different

and also sort of collaboration in the way that you're describing between people kind of figuring out a new way of thinking or talking about the world.

And I think one of the problems is that those three things are actually different

enterprises that were loosely joined and that came apart.

And when you took the distribution part away into social media, the rest of it collapsed.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: One of my observations about the incentives that were put in place for both the platforms and for, in some ways, America,

was that the primary incentive was scale.

When the platforms were growing,

the primary incentive that linked shareholders and designers and advertisers and in many ways, users, was just keep growing.

Grow as large as you could.

Encompass as many people in the world as you possibly could, right?

Yep, completely.

And there was no parallel incentive to retain intimacy.

There was nothing that was fighting for the most ordinary, natural human behavior that exists in the world, which is two people seeing one another and talking back and forth.

That had no one to advocate for it.

Here's how I think of it for myself.

And

I think your solution to this is kind of brilliant.

To be totally honest, like, I don't think you're going to be able to maintain this for very long.

And I really look forward to looking back on this experiment and seeing if it's if it's possible for you to maintain it i know that i couldn't do that um

and

and and the i the real i part of this and i and and i will situate this like firmly inside of myself is when i go on

twitter and Instagram, I experience like a wide variety of emotions,

and most of them are negative.

And I think

that is the primary driving force behind the sorts of things that I'm doing with my social media, not actually

anything that's bigger than that.

And so I think maybe

my sense of a non-collective actually is

my own sense, you know, my own sense that like um as the last 10 years have gone by on twitter um

kind of the lights the constellation of people who drew me to it have kind of blinked out and when i look out now

i see

information more than I see collaboration.

Like I see, when I look out now, I basically see a professionalized world which serves professional purposes purposes for me.

What I don't see is a community

in which I

and you like play this role together.

In part because we're performing on a thing.

I mean, not the collectively, you and me, like if we were on the internet, we are, we, and we're having these conversations.

It is a fundamental public, permanent performance, you know, or at least semi-permanent.

If you delete your tweets, it's not permanent, but, you know, and that, that to me, like, why am I doing that there?

I mean, that's a fundamental question, man.

Like, why, why are we doing this?

Like, well, so, like, why on Twitter?

Why in this place?

Like, why can't we do it in a million other ways?

So I'm going to pull you back away from the we for a moment

because I can speak to me.

No, you.

Why are you me?

Why are you like, why are you doing this?

Why am I doing this?

Why am I doing it?

Why am I speaking into this particular void?

Well, right now, my experience of Twitter is delightful.

I'm going to Twitter and I'm having all these tiny little conversations and I get to have them anytime I want with people who, for one reason or another, are individuals who something I have said has spoken to.

And that experience feels like rediscovering blogging in a way.

And I have been so enjoying it and so delighted to see it persist as long as it can that I hope it doesn't end.

And so I'm curious, why do you think it will?

Because it's just like the cultural norms of the thing will slowly start to creep in.

You'll have to do a thing

for work.

Someone will be a total asshole.

And you'll find yourself kind of burned by that a little bit and step back from it.

But that sounds like society to me.

I do a thing for work.

Someone is a total asshole to me.

And

I process it and turn it into a part of my social experience all the time.

Totally.

But I just mean within the context of the experiment.

Like at what point, because I think...

But what if it's not an experiment?

What if it's just the way I use Twitter?

It's kind of like this.

I mean,

you may be able to maintain this enchanted circle.

I mean, there is a chance, right?

But like every person who encounters that fresh has to like be enchanted again.

Wasn't that the way?

Meanwhile, they're doing this other set of interactions, having this other mode of operation in all their other Twitter stuff.

And then they step into your enchanted circle and

maybe

through like a lot of effort and maintenance.

And like, here's the greatest possible example from the blogging era: the Tanahazi Coates Twitter, Tanahazi Coates comment section.

Oh, yes.

The most enchanted circle

maybe ever to exist on the internet.

And it broke down.

And it broke down because that it takes work and maintenance.

It takes like emotional, intellectual, damn near physical labor to keep this thing going.

And that sounds to me like all communities in life.

I do not disagree.

I think the question becomes, and it certainly became for him, like at what point as it becomes interesting to people and other people want in on it

like it takes more work as but then and it's still awesome it takes more work and you know and in a community there are natural limitations to how things like that go and community organizers are notorious for burning out in the real world too yeah you know so many communities

i had the experience recently of uh getting to interview one of

the people that i think of as among the greatest community organizers still living, a fellow named Larry Kramer.

You might know his work.

He was a co-founder of an organization called the Gay Men's Health Crisis,

right

in the beginning stages of the world beginning to understand what HIV and AIDS were.

He then went on to be kicked out of GMHC and to found another incredibly successful activist group called Act Up.

Dr.

Tony Fauci, who was

and is an incredibly influential figure in the American medical industry, has said that there are like two

eras in American medicine before Larry Kramer and after Larry Kramer.

He's just been that effective at

organizing people.

And yet he also has been pretty effective at getting kicked out of groups that he's founded,

it must be said.

But

he did,

in some ways,

it feels like the problem of community organizing, whether in the offline world or in the online world, is a problem of scale.

There is such a thing as too many people to speak to and to hear from.

And that the answer to the problem of scale is that when the conversation grows too large, you remove yourself and find a smaller one that speaks to you more.

Does that feel possibly like an answer to you?

It does.

I mean, it does.

I mean,

I feel like I'm like reigning on your parade, but I actually have like deep admiration for this impulse that you have to do this, which I feel like, you know, I don't know how well Radio Atlantic listeners know you, but it extends far beyond this one particular experiment.

And I,

and like any good community organizer, I feel my own

basically laziness and like lack of willingness to try and change the world around me.

And instead, you know, am enacting basic survival within this,

within this tool, you know, and I think there's one other dynamic that I want to mention within it, which is that when I'm putting energy into my phone, like I'm not reading a book at that time.

I'm not like

exercising.

I'm not just sitting there with my kids.

I'm doing other things.

And so the trade-off,

and this is in part like a defense of myself, I think.

The trade-off here that I

am not really willing to make is trying to fix my Twitter experience by putting more energy and time into it.

Instead, my thought has been, you know, I have a really, really the kind of deep and passionate relationship with my block, my literal block, physical block that I live on in Oakland.

And like, I like putting energy there.

You know what I mean?

It's different.

It's hard and weird.

And, you know, we don't, you know, everybody's very different.

And, but it's, but it's also amazing.

And like, there's just so many, there's such a community resource to draw on there.

And crucially, crucially,

people

have a basic desire to want to live together

and be

a strong community because we're all there.

You know what I mean?

Like the thing about Twitter that's so weird is like somebody can come and just strafe you and then just be gone, you know, and they like mute you.

Someone can,

there isn't like an organizing

function that says like, hey, you know what?

We're all here on this block.

If you do something really heinous, you're going to have to see the people you did that to for the next 20 years, you know, or even two months.

And I think, so I, so I have been putting energy into basically like the reading the distilled thoughts of other people and engaging with them directly, a lot of academic work and a lot of books.

And I have been putting a lot of effort into that like community block stuff.

And, and I recognize that in many ways, both things actually may have less impact than trying to do what you're doing, but they feel good to me.

Yeah.

And I think it...

Well, I'm going to make one more.

I'm going to make one last ditch effort to pull you into my little enchanted circle and through the looking glass, and then I'll get to the credits.

But I'm going to tell you an anecdote that I think will speak to you because I know you a little bit, Mr.

Alexis Magical.

So this morning, I went on a run.

It was...

It's cold morning in DC.

It's like in the 40s.

And the time I went was like 6.30 in the morning and the sun hadn't quite risen yet.

And I have, for whatever reason, just been back into a phase of my life where I'm kind of making more music again.

There was once a phase in my life when I made music a lot.

And on this particular run, I was listening to my own music.

And I was having a kind of solitary experience on my run, you know,

where DC

is not a runner's place like Minneapolis or like I gather Oakland,

where

you

when you run you feel like part of a community of runners

I have run with a community of runners in DC the front runners and they're awesome and it is awesome and I

am excited for every run that I can do with the front runners but when I'm on a solo run DC run runs do not the DC running community does not by and large feel very communal to me like as I'm running by people

the dialogue I hear between us is like listen buddy I'm on on my interval.

Can you step to your right?

Yeah, don't nod at me, asshole.

Yeah.

And so running can feel like a surprisingly solitary experience, even when I'm

being passed by others and give them a nod or a smile or something like that here in DC.

And so.

I was in this like mood this morning.

I was listening to a song that I had made and running to my own rhythm.

And so I tweeted to Cohen into the void.

I just stopped for a second on a bridge because I have developed a habit of stopping on bridges to take pictures on one side and then the other.

And so I stopped for a moment on the bridge, took my pictures, and then said on Twitter to my little enchanted circle, listen to your own music when you run.

And if you have no music, don't be afraid to make some.

And

it started a tiny little conversation in my enchanted circle.

It was this moment of

communal community

in the middle of what felt at that time like a lonely space, which was what the internet once was for me.

And I do wonder how much agency we as users have to bring that version of the internet back.

So let me ask you one more time.

Does that anecdote change anything about how you think about this experiment?

I think it's, I mean, it's lovely, man.

It really is.

I think

I'll answer it with like an anecdote of my own,

which is that I,

you know, some part of me feels very extrinsically directed, you know, that,

you know, I like

I like to engage with people and I like to feel that like their positive energy, you know, like I feel like I'm I and

some part of me has been like, you know, I'd like to be less that way.

I'd be like to be more satisfied with my own

judgments of

myself and what I'm doing in the world.

And so at one point I was working on a story about sort of a relationship between masculinity and some of these things.

And I ran into this book, which was, you know, 1950, team of sociologists publishes this book, and it turns out to be a huge hit, you know, selling 1.4 million copies called The Lonely Crowd.

And they basically argued that Americans had become other directed as opposed to inner directed.

And

the way that the sociologists presented it was, was like, hey, this is like just a thing that has happened.

The way it was received in American culture was as a critique that people, you know, they said people were using, you know, radar instead of their internal gyroscope.

And people were like, no, I want to be the kind of person who uses an internal gyroscope, you know?

And the example of that that became kind of most well-known was like kind of like, oh, the cowboy, you know?

And

it turns out that like the Marlborough man, you know, was like literally created sort of out of this same kind of thought, you know, that being on your own and being like a rugged individualist was in fact like the best way to like be a man, which then sent me back to my original premise and made me think like, actually,

maybe, particularly in a like a moment of MeToo where we're trying to listen to women's voices and really hear what they're saying about the experience of

being a woman and the experience of being a man as well,

that like perhaps like interdirection is sort of a trap and that in fact the only way that you come to like new understandings is like within

a communal setting and that this idea of the internal gyroscope leaves out like, well, who calibrated that thing?

You know what I mean?

Who calibrated these judgments that I'm making?

And how do I know that they're correct?

Particularly when you can't embody, literally, you can't embody like all the different kinds of experiences that people are having that might be quite different from your own because of, you know, class, power, privilege, race, gender, identity.

And so it's actually an amazing thing because I went to this book to find this evidence that like, oh yeah, I should be like interdirected.

I should just do these things.

And in fact, it ended up convincing me of the opposite thing,

which

was that listening more to people was in fact good.

And that's one reason why I feel kind of okay being in kind of read and listen only mode on Twitter right now

as well.

So well, anyway, this has been fascinating, Matt.

Like, I, you know,

I love your experiment in part because it is, it feels like such a direct challenge challenge to

my current approach, and it's kind of inspiring.

Hence, I wanted to talk, and hence you're welcome into my Enchanted Circle anytime you'd like.

All right, Alexis.

Thanks.

That was fun.

Now, before we end the show this week, a little heads up.

I'm going to be stepping away from the hosting seat, which I am currently merely warming for a voice who will be quite familiar to our listeners, that of my friend and colleague, Alex Wagner.

So I'm going to do a round of thanks that's a bit different than usual, and a little Easter egg for you constant listener who gets to the credits.

If you have been a constant listener, you know that Jeff has too occasionally indulged a talent for verse.

He's very good at it.

I less so, but I will dare it anyway.

And now Kevin, might you start our theme song?

First to Kevin Townsend, who's the bestest of the best, and has spent more time than I have hearing my thoughts at his desk.

Then to Catherine Wells, exe producer of our pods, for whose talents daily I give thanks and to the gods.

Then to Jeffrey Goldberg, Alex Wagner and the crew who made this program happen with me back when it was new.

Then to John Batiste, of course, whose music we now hear, for bringing smiles back to my face when it alights upon my ear.

To one listener, Barbara, your keeper, I didn't play, but I keep it to myself and it delights me every day.

To John Gould, that old friend of mine who gave the show its name.

It struck a chord back then and still it strikes me just the same.

I'll be gut from time to time, don't miss me when I'm gone.

Alex Wagner's back next week and and yes, the show goes on.

To all my friends who listen and then tell me that they do, every show I hosted was to make a show for you.

I'm gonna slow this down a touch, but keep it going.

Don't shut off just yet.

Now I am a listener and our listeners are so deep.

From week to week, my weakness was hearing the things you keep.

Every listener who deigned to listen to the end knows that after these credits I say a kind word to my friend.

For final benediction, I must thank Alexis M.

World and Public reveal nothing you once said, and so I am.

Alright, Radio Atlantic listeners, we'll be back.

Same bad time, same bad channel next week.

See you on the other side.

And thank you, thank you, thank you.