How To Live In The Social Media Matrix

This is the challenge, right? We're all living in this society where these very large and powerful businesses need us all to post a lot. We have to ask ourselves the question: what is the value exchange, and how maybe are we—how do we be careful we're not doing secret harms to [Music] ourselves?

Hello, this is Dalton plus Michael, and today we're going to talk about living in the social media Matrix. Now, Dalan, the Matrix came out in the 90s. Some people watching this are nodding and saying like, "Yeah, I know what they mean. The Matrix, like that thing with that guy." We should just take this video and explain what the Matrix is, and that'll be the whole video. Probably act out all the parts. What do you think?

That's a good video, Michael. So we're living in the social media Matrix. What does that mean? And maybe like 14 seconds on the Matrix—can you do Matrix in 14 seconds? I'll just do one part of the Matrix. So the Matrix is a thing that is computers for some reason people power it. Yes, and they don't really—there's a lot of details left out on how this came to be. But the idea is it is this big overlord thing, and all these people are trapped in it, and it's feeding off their energy.

That's what we mean by the Matrix. Where are the B batteries, and the robots are harvesting our energy?

That's right, great! So the analogy here is, social media are the robots harvesting human energy. Yep, Michael and I know a fair amount about social media companies. Um, sure, we've started some ourselves, and Dalan still is involved with one of the better-known ones. The idea is at a social media company you are not creating the content; you have a website, and people post things to the website.

Yes, every time someone posts content, it creates page views or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it in a mobile app. Sure, and you can put ads on those things, and it costs you nothing. You don't pay anyone to create those page views, and you make slivers of a penny on every ad that's displayed. That's it. That's the business. It's that simple. And so you need people to post a lot.

Yes, and I think this is the challenge, right? We're all living in this society where these very large and powerful businesses need us all to post a lot. Yes, and we have to ask ourselves the question: what is the value exchange, and how maybe are we—how do we be careful we're not doing secret harms to ourselves? How do you think about that?

So I think it's first being aware of the fact that everything you post, including this video, is like ending up on the internet somewhere that is monetized by someone else. Like Google is making money off us. I suppose that's the whole idea here. And when the robots take over, they're going to see this, and we're on a list somewhere.

That's exactly right. Um, and so first, like, hey, that's the truth. We're not kidding; this is actually how this works. Um, and they're not selling your data, right? It's— that's not the business model. It's more of just page views driven; they're selling everyone's eyes looking at your posts.

That's right. And then realize that there's all of these negative externalities, meaning side effects that are bad, to say in layman's terms. Yes, yes. Um, that you might not realize by doing this stuff. And so I think most younger folks are aware of being careful with their photos of themselves and putting their faces in things and having like fake Instagrams. You know, I think that's gotten out there.

I think so, yes. The news is out. The news is out. Yes, that's for the last decade; the news has been out. But we have like some advice here. We have a more nuanced view of how to think about this stuff, and maybe the best way to think about it is to realize a few things.

One: everything you post to the internet is forever, and even if you think it is deleted, there's a bunch of bots and scrapers that cache it forever. This is becoming more of a problem. Yes. Well, every AI company, the way it's been trained historically, is it's trained on like Reddit posts and Twitter posts and all that good stuff. This is a fact; you know, you can look into this.

And every blog post and every user post—this is the training corpus that you train AI on. So even if you think you delete it, there's real scrapers looking for stuff, and even if it gets deleted, it's in the database. So that's one thing.

Yep. And then two: the tools are getting better and better and better at sort of de-anonymizing people. Yes. Um, if you post a lot, even if you think you're anonymous, they can look at language patterns. They can look at the time of day. There are all these different ways that, yes, um you can do today, and in the future, I anticipate it will only be more powerful.

Let me say something controversial, right? Like you know, you should be careful about your photos. We're living in a world where you probably need to be careful about your thoughts. Yes, at least your publicly stated thoughts, which feels weird for me to say. Like we're free; it's America. I should be able to say whatever in front of Alexa because—sorry, there's no Alexa; we're good. All right.

Um, all right, I guess, you know, you are free to say your thoughts. You're probably more free to say your thoughts than any time in history, but your thoughts can be used against you. Well, and the point we're trying to make on this is you have a permanent record, and to pretend like you don't, I would argue, is being pretty naive.

Yes, yes. And so just let's be real: you have a permanent record on the internet. Yes, and you someday are likely going to have to explain to someone—your kids, or someone, your employer—about stuff you posted 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, or 10 days ago. 10 days ago, or this morning.

Yes, this sounds like a warning, but let's twist this into a positive: if you use this strategically, it can help you. Yeah, if you're aware of this phenomenon and you are comfortable posting things that you do think are defensible, or things that showcase your talents or skills or your thoughts or your writing, you can be noticed.

That is a great corpus to have on the internet to be remembered by forever. Again, Paul Graham, not writing a lot of essays as much these days—he's writing a few, but he has this great body of work, of amazing essays he wrot wrote over the years, and he's still changing people's lives by his writings. Literally.

Yeah, literally. Yes. And so if you're thoughtful about the stuff that you're putting on there, either anonymously or non-anonymously, it could be great for your career. It could be great for your life. You can meet interesting people. It's an amazing thing. So we like this stuff, right? We use social media. This is a—we're making a video; we're putting it on the internet here.

We're contributing to The Matrix. We have to answer for what we say in this video. Yes, what's tricky is that the platform—charitably, the platform is indifferent. Yeah, charitably; as long as you're generating ad views, the platform doesn't really care whether you are harming yourself.

Yup. And so, um, you have to care, and I think that that's the kind of point we're trying to make. And it's so visceral when it comes to photo. You don't want to be photographed drinking, or you don't want to be photographed in a compromising position. But, like, I think there are so many examples of people publicly trolling, publicly saying things they would never say if they weren't anonymous, and thinking it's free.

Thinking that, like, they can't be caught and almost imagining that your internet persona and your real-life persona are different people—again, maybe people get that. But I remember when Twitter came out, thinking it was weird to meet people that knew me from the internet.

Yep. And I think we've been living our current lives for a long time, when we—the internet's real, friend. Exactly. Like, things I say on the internet have a very real impact on my day of walking around on the streets, and I think some folks have never experienced that.

And so you almost have this split-brain thing. Yes, oh, this is my internet life. Yes, and I do all these things on the internet, and this is my real life. And these are unrelated identities that I have. And that's going away. I think it's not real. I think you have to realize that things on the internet are real.

So I think one of the big takeaways here is that, um, it's a double-sided coin—literally. There's a lot more risk posting on social media now, but you can extract literally tons of benefit—like way more benefit than maybe people would imagine.

Yeah, if you think of this as having a permanent record on the internet forever that's attached to you, and you see that as a good thing, not a bad thing, yeah, you can actually build a large corpus of writing. Yes, um, also, GitHub is something that already people are scraping. Recruiters are scraping, trying to find who to hire.

If you just keep posting good code to GitHub over a long amount of time, it's going to pay huge dividends for your career as a programmer. Um, and so, yeah, just realize that you have this permanent record and intentionally and thoughtfully put stuff on there.

We do this ourselves, right? We're making these videos; we put out other things on social media. We, of course, do public speaking, and we do our best to put things on our permanent record that we're proud of.

Yeah, and we're careful because we know that this stuff lives forever, and because we know that sometimes there's time for public thoughts, and sometimes there's time for private thoughts. Yep, you want to make sure that you understand that and you act that way before you get burned, right? That's an easy lesson to learn post getting burned.

Yeah, you don't need to learn the hard way. Yeah, this is one of those—you can just take people's word for it. You can, and, and, and your life might go easier.

All right, great chat, D. Thanks. [Music]