two quotations on innovation and influence

Joseph Bernstein:

Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial features no one cares about. And yet the people most alarmed about Facebook’s negative influence are those who complain the most about how bad a product Facebook is. The question is: Why do disinformation workers think they are the only ones who have noticed that Facebook stinks? Why should we suppose the rest of the world has been hypnotized by it? Why have we been so eager to accept Silicon Valley’s story about how easy we are to manipulate?

Within the knowledge-making professions there are some sympathetic structural explanations. Social scientists get funding for research projects that might show up in the news. Think tanks want to study quantifiable policy problems. Journalists strive to expose powerful hypocrites and create “impact.” Indeed, the tech platforms are so inept and so easily caught violating their own rules about verboten information that a generation of ambitious reporters has found an inexhaustible vein of hypocrisy through stories about disinformation leading to moderation. As a matter of policy, it’s much easier to focus on an adjustable algorithm than entrenched social conditions.

Dan Wang:

I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.

The internet companies in San Francisco and Beijing are highly skilled at business model innovation and leveraging network effects, not necessarily R&D and the creation of new IP. (That’s why, I think, that the companies in Beijing work so hard. Since no one has any real, defensible IP, the only path to success is to brutally outwork the competition.) I wish we would drop the notion that China is leading in technology because it has a vibrant consumer internet. A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader.

This juxtaposition offers much to reflect on, but one brief comment: The idea that Silicon Valley is meaningfully innovative and the idea that Silicon Valley shapes our social order are the products of the same PR machine, and so perhaps should be subjected to what Con Law calls “strict scrutiny.” As Wang often points out in his fascinating analytical work, one of the biggest differences between China and the USA is that China thinks technologies made of Atoms are more important, and more worthy of major investment, than technologies made of Bits. As Dan Wang says elsewhere — oh crap, I’m ruining my #twoquotes post with a third quote, oh well — anyway, this is a good point:

The internet is important, and we’re likely still underrating its effects. But I don’t think that we should let innovation be confined entirely to the digital world, because there’s still too much left to build. The world isn’t yet developed enough that everyone has access to shelter, food, water, and energy at a low share of income. Hundreds of millions still live in extreme poverty, which means that manufacturing and logistics haven’t overcome the obstacles of delivering cheap material comfort to all.

I am not in any way rescinding, or even questioning, my long-held view that Facebook is evil and should be destroyed. But if Bernstein is right, then Facebook is more of a symptom than a cause of our social afflictions, and we are even more screwed than I have thought we are. And if Wang is right, then smart people who have some influence need to turn their attention to technologies of Atoms.

All this is of course related to my recent posts on climate change and geoengineering.