Katherine (10s):
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman joining me is Doc Searls and also joining us is Petros Koutoupis who, you know, from many, many previous episodes. Before we get started, I wanted to remind everyone that we started a newsletter. If you got the first issue. Awesome. We'd love to hear your feedback. And if you haven't, sign up at reality2cast.com on the newsletter signup link, and you'll start getting them and we look forward to putting them out. So today we're, we're kind of going over a weekly reading list for, for lack of a better explanation.

Katherine (54s):
And there are a few things that are on our mind and if sort of piqued our interest, one of them is the recent executive order geared toward regulating social media and the most recent news that Ajit Pai of the FCC has indicated they have the green light from the FCC's general counsel to clarify section 230 of the communications act, which is, you know, has a lot of, a lot of the tech community rightly concerned and a somewhat related intertwined issue is the relationship between Journalism and social media. So, you know, if you, if the goal by the current FCC, for example, is to regulate social media as if they are a media outlet, what we'd like to do is unpack whether or not they are, because, you know, I personally don't think they are.

Katherine (1m 50s):
And I think the three of us have a few strong opinions about that. And, and, and we'll get into that. So let, so let's, let's figure this out. Let's figure out the relationship between the, the tech giants like Google and Facebook and traditional media, for example, the New York Times, you know, and I think they're, they're certainly not the same. And, and I think there's a danger and, and, and assuming that they are similar. So what do you think about that?

Doc (2m 21s):
I guess I could jump in because of probably yelled more about this than either of the other two have, yeah. The executive order is to understand it and I risk being wrong about this because I think he came out in what May? Something like that does that the one we're talking about Trump's, Trump's one of his, one too many executive orders that went out earlier this year. And he's just trying to clear the space to saying whatever the hell he pleases on, on Twitter and Facebook, mostly on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, quite aside for the fact that Trump is being Trump here, and we all know what that's about, whether red, whether we like him or not, we know what that's about.

Doc (3m 5s):
There's no mystery they're as to what he's trying to do, what I, but as a journalist, I, you know, I've, I have to tell you, I mean, it isn't just Facebook and Google. Facebook and Google actually play two roles here. One is they are places on the web and in our lives through other products that occupy a significant part of our lives or many people's lives, but they're not the whole damn thing. And I mean, we don't spend all of our time searching on Google and being on Google maps and, and, and being on Facebook, we're in a lot of other places. And that's where the other role that Google and Facebook play and Google, especially, which is that it's the backend for the way an awful lot of advertising gets routed.

Doc (3m 52s):
And the way and advertise is largely routed, as we've learned on earlier, Reality 2.0s and from following Augustine Fou and me and other people who write about this and talk about this, you know, we're tracked everywhere and, and, and there's a really inefficient, but highly complex system that Google is in the middle of the, at the back end of this, that's busy guessing at what we might want to see or not what we want to see, but what ads could be aimed at our eyeballs aside for the fact is it is an awful system. Most of that actually doesn't go out through Google. It actually goes out to the rest of the web. It goes to the New York Times, it goes to the Wall Street Journal, It goes to Breitbart, It goes to Business Insider.

Doc (4m 34s):
It goes to a zillion publications and all The world's blogs, all the world's blogs that are supported by advertising. And, and those aren't the only companies in it. Adobe is in there and a huge way. So is, so is Amazon and Amazon can brag better on what they are and how effective they are because they know how you shop, and they can aim some ads based on that. And they make big profit on that. And it makes small profit as I understand it in, in their ordinary retail. And even in AWS. And some people I hope will dispute me on that, but the fact remains that they're in the ad business too, and they can claim to be better at aiming this stuff than others are, what does this do to Journalism?

Doc (5m 13s):
Well, the main thing had happened at Journalism and happened to us at Linux Journal is that as they put it in advertising wheat and chaff or separating advertising, wheat and chaff, and an essay I put up several years ago, Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct marketing, ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself. What happened is that most of the advertising we see online is actually direct marketing. It is not advertising. Advertising is what taught me that 15 minutes will save me 15% with Geico. And there's such a thing called Ford tough, and that I'm in good hands with Allstate. And a lot of other things like that that are that's real branding that has made almost all the brands known to the world.

Doc (5m 56s):
And that is not tracking advertising, which has not made a single brand known to the world. They are very, very different, just it's just that they looked the same. And what happened with Journalism is that the sponsorship that supported Journalism is, is, you know, went away because you could F you could track the wall street journals reader, and then hit them at Breitbart because they're just aiming at eyeballs, right? That's the, that's the main thing this would Don Marti said, he's one of our prior, probably our, one of our best prior editors in chief. And he's been all over this case and he's working with consumer reports now. And was it Mozilla for a long time.

Doc (6m 36s):
He knows his stuff around this. It it's a really complicated story, but the main thing is the sponsorship went away. And that in a real sense is what killed Linux Journal, what kills a lot of other publications. And the only because we didn't want to take tracking based advertising. So you're going to take tracking based advertising. You stay in business. Tim Hwang just came out with a book. He was coming up with the book, maybe today, he's another colleague of mine called "subprime attention crisis", where he says, the whole thing is a bubble. It's about to burst anyway, my point, and this is kind of like my main point. I don't mean to filibuster here. My main point is that it isn't any of the stuff that's killing journalism. It's the freaking internet and digital technology itself because the internet is supports everything.

Doc (7m 22s):
Absolutely everything. It's like gravity, it's like blaming gravity for, for running or something. And everybody could be a journalist. Now that is what social media is enabled. And at an early state, you know, anybody could be a journalist. Anybody can take their phone and they could shoot pictures of things, bad things being done. George Floyd, for example, was made possible and as such by social media, but by the fact that smartphones have, have journalistic equipment on them, all of us can be journalists. And that means all of the publications of the world. We're no longer in charge of things. And what Matt went and met was another thing. I don't know if we're talking, I Matt Stoller's piece or not, but anyway, and that's another piece we'll talk about, but we'll get there.

Doc (8m 4s):
Everybody wants policy to solve this. It won't. So that's my, that's why they it's the internet folks. It's not social media.

Katherine (8m 12s):
So, so you bring up Matt Stoller's article and I'll link to it in our description and an editorial in the New York times, he wrote that tech companies are destroying democracy and the free press. And, you know, it's a bold statement. It's not altogether untrue, I guess, but it's, it might be problematic as well. I mean, I think so. So one of the things, you know, and one of the, the sort of core ideas I think in his editorial is that he treats tech companies like utilities or social media platforms like utilities. And I think there's a danger in that. And we've talked about that a little bit offline. You know, my personal feeling is that it's not so much that, you know, going back to the executive order and, you know, there was a quote from the head of the FCC saying, I believe, let me read it.

Katherine (9m 5s):
"Social media companies have the first amendment right to free speech, but they do not have a first amendment, right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters." Well to me, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's the comparison that just doesn't mean that doesn't make any sense, holds zero water, comparing a social media platform to a media outlet, completely confuses the idea of a content creator versus just a communication platform. I mean, to me, that would be like going after the printing press manufacturer for the content and the newspaper. So to me, that's a better analogy, you know, I don't know.

Katherine (9m 44s):
I don't, I don't like the idea of talking, talking about it as a utility, frankly, because utilities are regulated.

Petros (9m 50s):
Yeah. I see it more as a vehicle. I mean, that's, it helps you, it helps the person get their voice out. Right. But they're not, they shouldn't be held responsible for that place.

Katherine (10m 3s):
How could they be? So, and so part of this executive order of going after, you know, Section 230 ,well Section 230, they seem to focus primarily on this good Samaritan thing that basically they're saying platforms like Twitter and Facebook are taking advantage of the good Samaritan reporting part of section 230, but they seem to kind of ignore the, the, the fundamental, like the, the, the previous and, and more significant, I would say prior to the lawyer wants to told me that word order matters. Whatever has mentioned first, you know, is the most important thing and illegal documents.

Katherine (10m 47s):
So the beginning of section 230 is about liability. So if you go after Section 230, you're going to, you're trying to make platforms liable for other people's content, which goes back to my analogy about the printing press, if you make it. So if you make those, if you make Twitter liable for what I post, or what you post, or what any politician posts or what any, you know, conspiracy there is posts, they just would have to see us to exist. They can't possibly be held liable for that. I mean, it, I understand that there, there seem to be going after this and a free from a free speech perspective, but I'm on the other hand that it makes zero sense to me, because if you, again, if you want to hold the platform liable, then you're shutting down speech completely.

Katherine (11m 35s):
It's not, you know, that doesn't suddenly allow everybody to, you know, freedom from any perceived censorship on the part of Twitter. That actually means the Twitter has to just shut down because they're going to get sued because, you know, somebody posted while I, you know, I cured myself of COVID by drinking a gallon of bleach. And so I go, well, I hate Twitter. I read it on Twitter. So, so, you know, I'm there, you're there for responsible for that content. So anyway, and I wondered what y'all thought about all of that.

Doc (12m 6s):
I'm just trying to be quick this time. And that's a good analogy. I mean, it's, it's like, you know, I'm trying to stop the, the inventors of the printing press to, you know, movable type holding, movable type a liable for everything else. I mean, I, I forget who said it, but, you know, free speech belongs to anybody could buy their ink by the barrel. I think it was Mark Twain. Maybe it was, but anyway, but what happens now is that free speech belongs to anybody who can get their pixels, you know, and our bits for free. And by the way, that's anybody. And whether, whether they get those bits from Facebook or Twitter or from their own server, it makes no difference. It's the fact that bits are abundant and the ability to arrange them into, into voice and text is more or less infinite, and anybody can do it anywhere.

Doc (12m 51s):
And, and that's really where, where we're at and, and blaming the big technology companies for ruining democracy and ruining journalism, or in the case of Trump of this executive order is saying that, you know, it's, we need to change the regulatory apparatus for these big companies. So that said, I can tweet without, without, you know, fear of censorship is, is ludicrous. Find another place. I mean, interesting thing is, I mean, if Trump had set up his own non Twitter thing in the white house and said, here's white house, you know, I'm going to take white house.gov. It is going to be nothing but me saying shit for the next four years, have you done that in the beginning? He'd still have like, you know, millions of people following that, you know, he could have used RSS and have it syndicated into everybody's inbox.

Doc (13m 38s):
I mean, there's no nothing to stop that. And, you know, he chose to use Twitter, fine, you know, but regulating them is, is, is a mistake in my opinion.

Katherine (13m 49s):
Well, he chose, he chose Twitter for the same reasons. And a lot of people choose Twitter. It's, it's where the people are, and you go, you know, you go to the people that you want to read, so, yeah.

Doc (13m 58s):
Mm. And it's easy, you know what I mean? That's the way it's easy. It's easy. You want to set something up on Facebook it's really easy to do.

Katherine (14m 4s):
Yeah. Well, I, I, I might argue that actually, but yeah,

Petros (14m 10s):
It's even much easier on Twitter. Right? You have limited characters that you can, that you can type, and you can get away with misspelling things.

Katherine (14m 19s):
Yeah, but you can't edit it, that's the thing, that's the biggest problem yourself and real hot water,

Doc (14m 25s):
And you can delete them, you know, but then it's remembered somewhere. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now that it's gone

Petros (14m 31s):
I mean, they can still dig up tweets from so-and-so right. That was probably deleted years ago. I mean, we read that the scandals with a lot of these like Hollywood celebrities or any other celebrity where all of a sudden, you know, we've discovered that six years ago they said something about, yeah. You know, whatever it can, and then the, the internet preserves everything.

Doc (14m 58s):
Well, it, it's also a whiteboard, you know what I mean? There's some things that have been written and they've utterly disappeared. You know, I mean, a lot of it is utterly disappeared. The, the internet archive of his trying to do a good job. And I think they do to some degree, but an awful lot of it is live. I mean, look at Vine or, you know, Snapchat. I mean, that's, that's all whiteboard. I mean, what's left the Vine at this point. You know,

Katherine (15m 25s):
I suppose the reality is that the content that we want to never disappear does or frequently does. And then, and then the stuff we don't ever want seen again is indelible.

Doc (15m 44s):
Yeah. Yeah. You know, my, my wife is also involved in the next journal, but is not very public. So namer, I thinks that this period in history is going to be disappear. I mean, because it's all digital, it's all volatile. It's there. As long as somebody, if, you know, if the internet archive doesn't rescue it, it's gone. But even that is not permanent, it's a bunch of drives. Right. So somebody wipes out, all those drives in all the backup drives. It's gone to a, you know, a thousand years from now, we'll look back and say, what happened in the early two thousands? Well, it's all gone. We don't know, you know, we, we stored it and digital in digital form, and nobody could read that now, what was that?

Katherine (16m 26s):
How many people, you know, early on switching over from film to digital cameras have lost all of their photos because we didn't, we had no concept and backing it up. Or

Petros (16m 37s):
I was just going to mention that. Yeah. It's like taking your old vinyl's and then converting them to yeah.

Doc (16m 44s):
Yeah. And just melting them down, you know, how to, it needed the vinyl for something else. And then

Petros (16m 49s):
It's like, when I converted my parents home movies from VHS to,

Doc (16m 57s):
Oh good. I got that top. I converted, my parents had home movies on 16 millimeter and an eight millimeter film through the leg, early sixties from the thirties through the early sixties, their own worth from the thirties. And, and including my parents in Alaska and stuff like that, that's where they met. And, and I took that and converted, all of them to VHS tape had, had done professionally to VHS tape. Then we played the VHS tape and recorded my mother in vivid stereo on a stereo recorder with stereo mic onto cassettes.

Doc (17m 39s):
And I've wanted to merge those two together in a digital form. I can't even find the tapes at this point. I don't know where they are. And they're probably in a hot garage someplace getting ruined, who knows. I mean, this I've, I've tried to play a lot of tapes. So we're on zoom right now, so the rest of you, you are hearing this, but you can't see it, but I've got a four track reel-to-reel deck behind me and everything I've tried to play on. It goes [makes a sound of a bad recording] the thing that has to be fixed. And probably won't be, so it's a loss

Katherine (18m 7s):
Plug for floss weekly. If they watched the video floss weekly, they can see your cool.

Doc (18m 11s):
Yeah. They could see it can see that in my background. Yeah. And floss weekly. Yeah. But it's true. So if you want to see things that don't work, go there.

Katherine (18m 22s):
So getting back to Matt Stoller is, you know, editorial, there's, there's one part that I thought that I would pull out these two phony Facebook pages illustrate he's referring to some Facebook accounts that were removed. They were allegedly run by Ukrainians. And anyway, they they've been removed because they violated Facebook's policy. And then the quote is he goes on to say, these two phony Facebook pages illustrate the crisis of the free press and democracy advertising revenue that used to go to quality.

Katherine (19m 3s):
Journalism is now captured by big tech intermediaries. And some of that money now goes to dishonest low quality and fraudulent content. Well, I can't, you know, I, I find no fault with that statement and it seems, you know, pretty, pretty reasonable, but I wondered, you know, given this problem that, you know, like you say, sponsorship dried up a bit, the money went toward, you know, display, advertising, tracking that sort of thing, given that, how do, how do you bring back old fashioned, let's call it quality journalism given that people want to spend ad budgets on these massive networks, whether it be through Google or as you pointed out earlier, Adobe or Amazon or Facebook or whatever, given that.

Katherine (19m 59s):
So, you know, so much money is going there. How do you redirect it? Is it, is that, I mean,

Petros (20m 8s):
The question is people want quality. Journalism, I mean, we've gone to a point where the scary, you know, just, just going back to Twitter, you know, people get their news via these micro blogging platforms. I mean, they'd rather get a few sentences if that at a time. And that's their news. I mean, do we want, and I don't mean you and I.

Katherine (20m 33s):
No, I heard the same thing. I do the same thing. Although I would argue that I have a pretty well curated list of people. I follow, for example, you know, I, on Twitter, I have very specific lists of people. Not necessarily even through my personal account, through even in the podcast account, I find the people that we're following through the podcast account. If I log into that account, I find that, you know, the quality of the information shared there is incredibly high and incredibly valuable to me. So, so, but, you know, do I assume that everybody is heavily curating their, their list and the same way?

Katherine (21m 21s):
No, I do not. And I, you know, I, you know, everybody self-select, you know, to their own biases and, and that can get, well, that can get a little bit iffy

Petros (21m 34s):
And it also boils down to perception. Right? You said, you said to yourself, just now you follow a curated list of high quality materials, but there could be somebody else on the other side of the spectrum that believes the same thing. Right. But their curated list could be full of misinformation, but to them it's high quality. I mean, it's, it's, it's

Katherine (21m 59s):
But, Petros, I know better.

Doc (22m 3s):
Yeah. So I'm looking here at, I'm looking at my, my Twitter feed as it were, and, and I've hired. And I think of my list is of who I'm following is curated, but it's over 5,000 people and I've got 25,000 followers, which is meaningless because I hope I'm one of those people. You are a probably either by swim cell, but I, I don't know. I mean, but here's the thing I, as I go down, I, you know, I see some music, I see some tech, here's some work tech, you're such a weird thing about an hour and a plane here's of course is Reality 2.0, here's something Apple did.

Doc (22m 45s):
I, here's another, you know, you know about this, but most of it's about the webcast, the webcast I'm on, or the, those kinds of things it's, you know, and then about fires cause of covered fires and sports, just to think about sports and, you know, because I never use the T word, you know, I mean, on, on there, if somebody I like is busy writing, only about I could say it here only about Trump or only about politics, I just either stopped following him or I just hurry past, you know, so I'm not, I'm not seeing them, you know, and that it I've got a similar thing going on in Facebook, but on Facebook, mostly I'm in groups in the groups are weirdly have no advertising in them at all.

Doc (23m 31s):
And I realized it's because I kind of self selected there and I didn't want to see any targeted advertising, so I'm not seeing it. And I've got the sort of the privacy stuff cranked up all the way. So I guess that eliminates me as a, as a target, which is, you know, weird. But I mean, and good. I think, I, I don't know, it's I, and an interesting thing here is that there is a way that the, there was a way forward for preserving the journals that are successful. I should point out the New York Times, the Wall Street jJournal, the Atlantic, you know, lots of, lots of reputable journalistic enterprises are doing just fine, you know, so it's not, and, and they're doing it more and more of a subscription, subscription is the hot thing right now.

Doc (24m 21s):
And, and for that matter on podcasts, if we're willing to read live ads like I do on floss, we can, and we get big enough here on this podcast. We'll start doing that. And that's the old fashioned way that is the oldest way to do advertising. There is, you know, that the hosts kind of endorses the product, then the product supporting the host and you know, and the guests and it's all there. And even if you're, you know, but it's still contextual, you know, it's, and, and that's the big thing. It's contextual ads. You're, you're doing sports. We're going to give you the car ads. So we're going to give you the tire ads. We're going to give you ads for deodorant. We're going to give you ads for, for fitness products.

Doc (25m 2s):
And because that's, that's roughly the audience you're looking for and you can make a brand that way, but it's an open question for me, whether or not you can make a brand on something that's as small as your phone. I'm not sure you can. I think it's something as big as your TV. You can, when you're eating up to 30 seconds or 60 seconds of somebody's time, but maybe not on your little thing where you can hit the fast forward. All the podcasts I listened to, basically I hit, I hit the 32nd jump forward, jump forward, jump to her to jump forward. And Joe Rogan, for example, is like seven minutes of ads at the beginning of his podcast. And he just sold for a hundred million dollars. But I'm wondering how many of his listeners are just hitting that fast forward, you know, 14 times,

Katherine (25m 42s):
Well, the fair, a fair number, but enough gets through. I think, I think not to go back to our last week's conversation, but, you know, I, I think the nature of the way that people listen to podcasts, sometimes let's say during a workout or driving, or while they're doing something else, I think that lends itself to the same, the kind of, you know, pre-roll sponsorship advertising because, you know, and people are sometimes just too distracted. Like when I used to listen to a lot of podcasts while driving, I would, I'm not going to be, you know, without my phone while I'm driving and fast forward to the, to the ads, I'm just going to let them play and, you know, no big deal.

Katherine (26m 25s):
And I, I think that that might be, you know, an, an advantage of the medium, just again, not.

Doc (26m 31s):
And I went for a walk last night. I mean, it did during the, I'm sorry, there's a leaf blower in the background, they're doing a podcast attracts leaf blowers. So when it does, it does either that or chainsaws or anyway, I was, I decided, okay, I'll go for my evening walk and listen to either Trump or, or Biden on ABC and NBC. They were, and I couldn't get an ABCs T radio station on my phone, but I could get an NBC one soy or whichever what it was. Oh, the ABC one had had. So I heard part of Biden's town hall. And then when they broke for ads, I turned rhinos headed home.

Doc (27m 15s):
It took the whole walk home. It was like, I don't know how many minutes of ads they had in a row, probably four, which is eight ads, but it seemed like fricking forever, you know, because they had to listen to the whole thing to wait for it, to come back on. And that was interesting to me. I mean, you know, that, I mean, are we going to put up with that forever? I kind of feel like maybe not. I don't know. What about you, Petros you put up with that

Petros (27m 41s):
That's how it's always been though. You know, I remember the, you know, the days before the DVR and waiting, waiting until the commercial break to, to run and use the bathroom. I, I, you know, it's funny because I have the same conversation with my, my children, you know, they're like, is this live? Can you fast forward this? No, I can't fast forward it. You know, you're just going to have to sit down and, and sit through these ads. But yes, specifically to the debate yesterday, I, I, instead of sitting down and, and, and just, you know, forcing ourselves to watch through the ads, we would flick back and forth between both town halls during the, the, you know, during the commercial breaks.

Petros (28m 26s):
I just, I can't tolerate it anymore. We've gotten so accustomed to at least in this household to not want it, to watch commercial breaks to the point where either one will either flip the channel during them or two, if we can't fast forward, and we want to watch something live, we'll start watching it 15 minutes later, just so we don't have to deal with watching the commercials and even on radio, you know, I, I will just change the station or fortunately things like Sirius XM or whatever, have fewer and shorter,

Doc (29m 6s):
Let's try it. And that's true. Yeah. And they, and they, and they know, I think, I mean, I'd be really interested in the numbers of should. They're never revealed them, but I know from talking to people, for example, at NPR, if you're using say their pot of their, their NPR, one app on your phone would use to be called NPR one, it's actually reporting back not what you're doing as a person, but this user again is anonymized, you know, skipped over this, didn't skip over that. They know they know what people jump around in. Oh. And the crank it up to win a half speed or something like that because of, you know, like the daily, under the New York times is the guy named Michael Barbaro who does this.

Doc (29m 50s):
It's always welcome to the daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. He's so slow. I can easily listen to him at two X speed, no problem. But if his Guest is on and they're talking fast, I have to slow it down. But, you know, we, we value our time. Right. And we haven't figured this out yet. I mean, that's another point here, you know, is, you know, and I figured it out,

Petros (30m 12s):
Actually, it's, it's funny that even, even in Journalism, I will open up a news page or, you know, something a webpage. And because of the time taken for that advertisement to load, sometimes that page does not render well or does not load in a timely manner. I usually give it five seconds if it doesn't open and I shut the entire page down and move on. I mean, this is like you said, it it's the way we value our time. I'm not just going to say we've gotten so accustomed to just, you know, bypassing a lot of this noise that we just don't want to deal with it anymore.

Doc (30m 57s):
Yeah. But then we get, you know, it, it's sort of, it is interesting how people oriented that there was a really great show called defending the caveman back in the early nineties, by getting brought back her. And it, it turned out it got franchise. So there were usually, he's a comedian. And he talked about, it was all about men and women or men versus women. And his cases that women were still gathered as the men were still hunters. Only men at that time, you know, w women would gather was details'. And what we'd been wanted to do was kill things with Spears only, they didn't have Spears anymore. They now had remote controls for the TV and women would look at the TV and like what's on.

Doc (31m 39s):
And men would, because it was before DVRs that things, and men would look at TV as like, get that off my TV, get that off my TV, get that off my TV. This is what we have with my wife and me. I mean, she will, she watches evening news shows. She jumps around and she tolerates the edges and really care. I mean, they run, they run right through like four minutes of ads. I pick up the remote control and I want to kill off every one of them, because I want them out of my room. I, this is get that off my TV and get that off my TV, get that off my TV. And she's amused by that, that I'm. And I know there are four minutes of ads and I can jump forward 30 seconds, eight times to go click, click, click, click, you know, eight clicks. And then there we are, you know, getting back into whatever it is on the new show, but it's part, I mean, hurricanes is tolerating them.

Doc (32m 25s):
I don't think she's curious about them and just kind of tolerate them, but I don't, I I'm very much the caveman that wants to throw Spears into those things and, and get them off my TV. And there are some listeners right now are saying, no you're being sexist and all that. And blame Rob Becker. And go look at that show

Katherine (32m 45s):
Scanning back through, through our conversation about, you know, the, the Stoller article we were looking at. No, I'm just, I'm just going back to the utility idea. And I'm like, okay,

Doc (32m 56s):
Well, I mean, since you brought it up a friend from Indiana university, Barbara Cherry, who is of high repute on these things, I'm looking for her email, which I think I shared with you guys on this thing. We were talking to her this morning, but I miss most of the conversation because it was going in between meetings online. But what did she say? A, I'm trying to remember the rewind back to it. But anyway, her point was that, you know, that, that these things are not utilities, utilities. The government will tell you what's the utility. Electricity is the utility. The phone is the utility that I don't even know if the phone is, but the, but a, you know, gas is the utility.

Doc (33m 41s):
These are, these are things that are the government mandated and they're regulated as utilities. And we can call Facebook utility, but it's not, it's just, it's just a, it's a website and we use it and it's got to be an app and some other things, but there is nothing permanent about these things. And, and they're, especially in permanent and, and in the digital world, I mean, there, where's my space now. I mean, where's Microsoft. I mean, we're going to break up Microsoft and the late nineties and who cares about it now? You know, Microsoft was like the biggest contributor or one of the biggest to the Linux foundation and they were fighting Lennox. They call it a cancer or something like that way back when the world changes.

Doc (34m 23s):
You know, I mean, it's, it's the, you know, that Geoffrey West wrote about this and why, why companies fail and, and cities live, you know, the internet is the city. It's got everything in it and it's going to live just fine, but, but you know, Facebook. And I remember what, what, when, you know, we talk about social media killing. Journalism. Remember when, you know, it was when shopping malls killed downtown? Well, shopping malls, didn't kill downtown. They didn't kill main street, the car. Did you know what I mean? It's the original, main streets are made for carriages and horses and people walking around.

Doc (35m 6s):
And, you know, and we brought that back with, you know, turning downtown and shopping malls and, and pedestrian plazas and stuff like that. But now the shopping malls are being killed by the, by Amazon, you know, are being repurposed by Amazon. And, you know, and the big box store has played in that too, but Amazon kind of half killed the big box stores. And now, you know, Walmart is in the same business. Right. And it, it all shifts, there's nothing permanent about any of these things. And I I'd rather rely on nature to, you know, to, you know, to, to deal with these things.

Katherine (35m 44s):
Well, I mean, yeah, yeah. And then see what it, let, let the vines grow on it and see,

Doc (35m 51s):
But nature is slow. I mean, nature is slow, but, and again, digital nature is still really young. We're in the digital world. It's, to me, it's like, you know, five minutes after the big bang and we have a few light elements and, and no galaxies, you know, and no heavy elements, the, the, the, the whole periodic table isn't filled out yet. And it'll be a lot bigger than the periodic table when it's done. It's almost like we haven't learned our lesson when we, when we broke apart the bell companies with your eight T and T. And yeah. So that's an interesting, really good, it's a great point.

Katherine (36m 25s):
Yeah. So, well, so, you know, again, we were talking about the analogy, you know, to utilities, but maybe all of these analogies are just, you know, a desperate grasp, but because it is so early, and we just don't understand it. And that, you know, I don't know who that collective we is, but the, we, whoever it is, doesn't understand it well enough. So we, so any time somebody writes about, you know, whatever the, you know, whatever struggle they perceive is, is rooted in internet technology.

Katherine (37m 6s):
You know, there's, this need to explain it in terms of something they do understand, like, you know, utilities or printing presses or whatever it is, but maybe this is all just, you know, a symptom of our lack of understanding. You know, maybe we need to stop trying to, to make, you know, those kinds of analogies and actually figure out what the hell it is. You know, like maybe we need to really figure out what Facebook is doing and figure out what Twitter is doing and figure it out. And I know it's too hard, we're nobody leaving it out.

Doc (37m 38s):
And, and so, I mean, to, to, to Petros his point about breaking up at, and T that was a really, that was, that did a lot of good back in 1984. It really did. I mean, we really did need to break up this thing. That was incredibly powerful. And, but we ended up as is kind of the sources of apprentice. We got a whole bunch of the same thing from a bunch of different companies and, and, and a lot of history happened after that and we'll go into it. But the, but what, what happened with the internet and especially with the web was that the internet and the web were like a Trojan horse that got wheeled into, especially the PGTs, which are the at and T's of Europe, which are far more powerful in many ways than at and T was because they were, they were state utilities, you know, and along comes a bunch of the physicists to say, we've got, we have a way of sharing documents.

Doc (38m 28s):
What do you say? We use this protocol HTTP on, on TCP IP and run through your pipes and not pay for anything, because we're just a, of high energy physicists. And they said, okay, you know, and that was the Trojan horse that had the web in it. And ultimately they made more money because of the internet. Right. But, but still, never fully understood it. I still don't think they understand it. And I think that, you know, we've seen this with open source and free software. I mean, like, I wouldn't say who it was, but I mean, and on the recent flush show, it was pretty clear to me any way that the, that the Guest wasn't really getting with the GPL was about, or the AGPL or, you know, these other things.

Doc (39m 11s):
And, and it's very hard for people to get with the GPL is about, it's very hard for them to get that, you know, giving people freedom and, and protecting the, the, the openness of this code along with the freedom that writes on it has some really major advantages. But if you're basically looking to make money off of something and by selling the code or access to the code or something else like that, you can't see it at all. And, you know, I, I mean, I look at what, you know, look at what China's doing and look at what Europe's doing with, with, with, with trying to, you know, with the G with the regulating privacy and in California regulating privacy. I think I'll probably end up voting, I think for prop 24 here in California, but its horrible.

Doc (39m 57s):
And I think what the GPL and the GDPR not to be confused of the GPL very different, but the, the GDPR and the CCPA have done have created a what a, a billion dollar business and compliance to, to, you know, the consent regulations that do nothing more than perpetuate exactly what the law was meant to meant to stop and, and, and, and inconvenience the entire web by putting these, these completely pointless. I mean, these, these completely misleading compliance notices on the front of every website, it's awful. And, and that's again, that's policy at work.

Doc (40m 38s):
So, but anyway,

Katherine (40m 39s):
And the go-to, I mean, that's everybody, all we have to do and our lawyers told us to do it. Yeah. And the whole, Oh my God. Yeah.

Doc (40m 49s):
You know, where, if we just had better protections on our own as individuals, I know I'm not seeing the guy damn ads. Okay. I'm not seeing them done. You know, we had that with ad block and we have that with tracking protection. The browser makers are coming in with it. Anyway. Why regulate that when you've got at an individual basis and the systematic basis with the browsers, ways of stopping it, just stopping, you know, and then,

Katherine (41m 14s):
Because like you say, it's, it's early and we're desperate. It's early in there. And while we're waiting around for the Mozilla's of the world to, to come up with the next version of their browser, that adds additional protections. You know, over on the other side, people are yelling at their congressmen I guess, or whatever it is that they're doing makes the legislators decide that it's, that it's up to them to fix the internet. I don't, I wish I knew why they go to knee jerk reaction to it. There's a problem on the internet is passed some new laws about it.

Doc (41m 54s):
Well, the way it was one of my favorite early onion headlines about this was error found on internet, You know, techies are on the case. So here's an interesting thing. So since we spoke last, Apple came out with a new, you know, where the iPhone 12 Google fanboys came back and said, wait near the pixel four. And now the pixel five is just as good with the camera. To me. The important thing is that as a photographer, if I have a choice between a new lens or a camera or a phone that does a better job than my big heavy weighs, 10 times as much as a phone SLR, what I want to get, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things that the, that my phone won't do that my camera does, but it's the thing I have with me.

Doc (42m 42s):
Right. I have it with me and, and they're getting really good. What I'm seeing now is that the phones, the phone cameras are leapfrogging. What you can do with, with a cinema camera, like a red camera or anything. I mean, that's where the science is going. It's going into the, you know, here's, you know, the tiny, the tiny little, little camera that's inside your phone. Wow. I mean, it's, it's, it's doing some amazing stuff. And then the software they lay on top of it. It's and again, you know, the, the Journalism that's done with the phones. That's not about social media. That is about the phones. It's about detected. All of us have with us fully distributed.

Doc (43m 24s):
Every one of us, we can save it back through. We can do it on Facebook and we can do it on Periscope. We could do it on Snapchat. We can do it on just our own, you know, just pull it into our own servers, all of that stuff as possible. And, and it's this little thing we hold in our hands to me, that's the, that's the D that's Reality to blow it off. That's the digital thing that's happening. And it's not just about what these big companies are doing or what government could do to regulate them.

Katherine (43m 51s):
Don't don't tell the FTC or they'll, they'll, they'll go after the phone manufacturers, after they're done with Twitter, because obvious, obviously it's Apple's fault, you know, whatever it gets filmed, a film, that's an interesting one. It's Apple's fault that whatever is recorded with their phone and put on the internet is harmful, right. Obviously the device then.

Doc (44m 14s):
Well, I think they can, as the, go ahead, Petros,

Petros (44m 16s):
I'm just going to save, reminds me of the age old argument. And it doesn't matter which side used to stand on how, when somebody gets shot and it's yeah. It's, it's not guns. Don't kill people, people kill people, right? Yeah.

Doc (44m 33s):
I there's a comedian named Johannson a few years ago. He said guns, don't kill people, bullets kill people. You know, and the funny thing is, he says, I've got a handful of bullets in my hand right now, hold still. I pushed them into your brain, you know? So, you know, or whatever, by the way, Ajit PI I'm told, and I haven't, I don't follow him. I was looking at him now is actually a funny guy I'm told, you know, that, I mean, quite aside from whatever, whatever there is, you know, I mean, I mean, I'm looking down to his thing here. He's got, he's a, I guess he's a chiefs fan. He's a big chiefs fan. I have a cousin who is the offensive line coach coach for the chiefs, by the way, Andy HEC.

Doc (45m 15s):
And he played for the Chicago bears, by the way, the bears that's for your Petros. He married a Chicago girl too, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.

Petros (45m 30s):
Actually interesting fact, although I do not remember his name, so please forgive me. But my neighbors grandfather was on the cover of the first issue of sports illustrated and they actually have a few copies in their basement, like framed and mounted and they have one of his jerseys and, and so on. I don't know, just fun little fact that you just reminded me of.

Doc (46m 5s):
So the Chicago story at there's a thing in San Francisco used to be in the way, I don't know if it still is anymore. And when I lived up there called the black and white ball, it was his formal ball that took place in the streets and like 13 different venues. And it costs like a hundred bucks to go and you wore a tux or a gown if you're a woman or something fancy, and, and you walked around town, you was these different venues and you stand there and you'd see, you know, somebody famous singing or something like that. And I'm standing at one of these, I think it was watching junior Walker of junior Walker and the all stars doing shotgun or Roadrunner or something. And next to me standing there is Mike Ditka, unmistakably, Mike Ditka there, at that point already the former coach to the Chicago bears, you know, himself.

Doc (46m 52s):
So that's my, my, the bears story.

Petros (46m 55s):
Yeah. My, my wife has her, my in-laws have pictures of them posing with the car you got around. Yeah, exactly.

Katherine (47m 6s):
So I'm thinking about, I'm kind of reflecting on all the things we've we've been talking about for the last, well, almost an hour. And I, you know, I'm thinking, I just, you know, I wonder, so we, you know, on one hand we seem to be, you know, have all the above the opinion, generally that Regulation doesn't necessarily doesn't help. It's definitely not the first step or the first place you go to, to solve any of these, you know, perceived problems. But it's on the, on the flip side, we also talk all the time about the harm in ad tech tracking, you know, privacy violation, which is at the heart of all of these platforms.

Katherine (47m 46s):
So, and I just wonder where, you know, where, how do these things fit together? You know, on one hand, do you do leave them alone and just let them do their thing? And, and cause because we, we certainly don't want to treat them like, like a, a media outlet because we don't think that that's what they are. But at this one, on the other hand, they do give bad actors, unprecedented access to spread misinformation and, and target groups of people. What's the word I'm looking at a very granular level.

Doc (48m 18s):
Yeah. You can, you can hack people with them. You're going to hack people with social media.

Katherine (48m 24s):
So I just, you know, I feel like the next episode is going to have to be the counterpoint to everything we just said today. You know,

Doc (48m 30s):
I can think of people who can bring on, but, and I have to be an interesting thing to do, but

Katherine (48m 37s):
Those two things, well,

Doc (48m 39s):
Every there's a law of tech that says what can be done, we'll be done with it until we figure out what's wrong with it. And then we stop doing that or we try to do less and I'm not sure we need Regulation to do that. I think, you know, with nuclear power, we blew up a couple of cities and we never did it again. And some other interesting effects that had to do with world powers and so forth. But, you know, we got more sensible about it, you know, with nuclear power itself, we discovered, wait a minute, what are we to do with the waste? Well, I want you to think about that. You know, I mean, we're doing, we're sort of fracking endlessly, and at some point maybe when Oklahoma blows up or so I'm going to say, well, maybe you shouldn't have done that. And who knows, you know, it's it, we kind of take everything to the limit and that's happening right now is social media.

Doc (49m 20s):
I think in the case of Facebook, it can't fix itself. It, the way it's made, you know, it's, it's made to maximize engagement. What is engagement, people to respond to something and to respond to things that they like or piss them off, you know? And then they throw ads in front of that. But if they started doing contextual advertising, I'm not sure it would make much difference because there's still, there's still the maximizing engagement, right. So they're still going to get everybody who loves Trump together with other people who love Trump and everybody who hates Trump or loves Biden, which, you know, I think Cape is possible. I don't know. I think he's kind of a blank slate, but you know, he's the non Trump, but anyway, you know, they tend to gather to, you know, and it's, and it's made for gathering them.

Doc (50m 6s):
And I, not sure they can fix that. You know, they hide that. They can't fix that. Yeah. That's my thoughts. Exactly. I don't, I don't know. I actually think it's Facebook has been Facebook for far too long and, and maybe some of that cannot be fixed. And also I quickly Googled it. And on the cover of the first sports was

Petros (50m 30s):
A Milwaukee Braves. Great Eddie Matthews. That was that's my neighbors grandfather. So anyway, moving back to the original town

Doc (50m 37s):
Is good. Good to go, to get close that loop.

Katherine (50m 39s):
Oh yeah. The original topic print Media

Doc (50m 42s):
This was the Eddie Matthews edition of yeah.

Katherine (50m 48s):
Well, so, so maybe, maybe that's where we leave it. Maybe next time tune-in and the next week or so, and maybe we'll have contradicted everything we said today, or maybe we won't, but I think that's, you know, that's the point. I think, I think it's important to have these conversations and at least I think if people take one thing away from our episodes, please think critically about these issues.

Doc (51m 18s):
I have to say, I love, I love that everybody talks about things being broken and they're still using them. So how can they be broken if everybody's still using these things? You know, it's like conversation is broken. I don't think so. We're doing it right now.

Katherine (51m 33s):
They're just, they're worth investigating. That's all. I mean, we use it. The, this podcast now has a Facebook page. I resisted it for quite a long time.

Doc (51m 41s):
Yeah, no, I think that was the smart, you know, and, and it's gotten a lot of response. I got to say it has. Yeah. You know, if you call us the Eddie Matthews, additionally, I have to listen to her to the end, to find out

Petros (51m 55s):
Exactly.

Katherine (51m 55s):
If you're, if you're inclined, if you're so inclined to use the social media, you can find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on YouTube. Although I neglect YouTube a bit. Where else can you find it mastered on any the fed reverse? I'm trying to think, where else are we

Doc (52m 14s):
Not the extinct kind, but no

Katherine (52m 18s):
Kind. Oh. And they sign up with our new, on our newsletter for please sign up for our

Doc (52m 23s):
Job and the person who is led by the way. And that was good. Yeah. It was awesome. Yeah.

Katherine (52m 28s):
Yeah. Well, I was mostly just pointing people at your writing, so,

Doc (52m 32s):
And you know, there's so much of it out there. It's easy to do.

Katherine (52m 35s):
Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll continue to do that a little and then some other things.

Doc (52m 39s):
So just close to this, I was told that I started to lay this even further. It's like Beethoven, editing a symphony. Doesn't know how to do it. That I got to pitch from Quora to basically to accept the, to, to, to take money because ads run next to the stuff I've written and Quora. Well, my answers on Quora, which I've been putting short answers to things there since 2011, 6,100 views this month, which I don't know what that, but if I sign up the money that would get me, but that it's more than my blog has had is an interesting thing.

Katherine (53m 18s):
It's just, Doc,

Doc (53m 21s):
Searls, it's just, <inaudible>

Katherine (53m 23s):
Link to the podcast

Doc (53m 23s):
And that's what I should do. I should do. I should, like, I should make myself an authority on podcast and say, it's all about, this is one podcast you really need to catch. There. It is. Step one post on step to get visited, bazillion times, step three, profit, step three, be around a long time. Leave a big crumb trail, whatever that is. Yeah. Okay. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody, until next time.