Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: My guest tonight is a stab writer at The New
Speaker 3: Yorker and author of the bestseller Trick Mirror, Reflections on
Speaker 3: Self Delusion. She's here to talk about social media companies
Speaker 3: monetizing hate and how we can use the Internet as
Speaker 3: a force for good. Please welcome, Gia Tolentino. So you've
Speaker 3: written about social media companies and how they monetize rage.
Speaker 3: Is there any way to Is there any way that
Speaker 3: they could be incentivized to stop this?
Speaker 4: One way that I think about it is like did
Speaker 4: corporations all throughout this, like the last century until the
Speaker 4: seventies have any incentive to stop like poisoning rivers and
Speaker 4: dumping their waist all over the place.
Speaker 2: They didn't.
Speaker 4: It's like cheaper to be shitty, right like they like
Speaker 4: it is it is in their financial best interest to
Speaker 4: just keep poisoning the river until someone makes them stop,
Speaker 4: which we could, but like you know, it's in their
Speaker 4: best in just for us to feel bad, right, Like
Speaker 4: you never hear someone being like I had an amazing day.
Speaker 4: I just sat and I scrolled for six hours, right,
Speaker 4: Like it's like you only do that when you feel
Speaker 4: you only scroll that long when you feel bad, and
Speaker 4: when you do that, when you scroll for that long,
Speaker 4: you feel even worse, and then you do it more,
Speaker 4: and that cycle is the primary way.
Speaker 3: It's like cocaine.
Speaker 4: It is like cricket.
Speaker 3: It was fun, right, I'm chasing that first one. It's
Speaker 3: just not going to come back, yeah, exactly. But uh,
Speaker 3: it's interesting because I see stories pop up that give
Speaker 3: me outrage, and I realized that they're designed to do
Speaker 3: it like it took me a second. A friend of
Speaker 3: mine whose leans a little right exted me this story
Speaker 3: about how the LGBT community wants to ban natural one.
Speaker 3: You know, you make me feel like a natural woman,
Speaker 3: Marretha Franklin. And I did like two clicks of research,
Speaker 3: and of course it was from a parody account, right,
Speaker 3: but picked up from papers. And then the parity account
Speaker 3: even said afterwards, like nobody called us for a.
Speaker 4: Comment, right, right, And then on no one check the
Speaker 4: about page on the website.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then on the left, you know, I read an
Speaker 3: article about the Missouri Senate making women's senators they couldn't
Speaker 3: wear sleeveless shirts, and I was about to go ape shit,
Speaker 3: and I went, oh, but the men afterwards, ties and suits.
Speaker 3: It's just a dress code, but it was designed to
Speaker 3: make me go bananas and it did.
Speaker 4: Right, I mean everything like if you are on a
Speaker 4: social media platform, that what you see is governed by
Speaker 4: an algorithm, which is basically all the major ones. It's
Speaker 4: all designed to make you feel like the best person
Speaker 4: possible and that everyone else is a dumb piece of shit.
Speaker 4: Like that's that is, that is what gets us to
Speaker 4: spend as much time on there as possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I used to go that righteousness porn yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And then you realize you don't actually want to see
Speaker 4: these male log wickers wearing tank tops anyway. You don't
Speaker 4: want to see it, and maybe we don't want to
Speaker 4: see anyone's upper arms.
Speaker 3: So I just want to be able to say point
Speaker 3: to someone as wrong and me as right, right, and
Speaker 3: then you get off on it.
Speaker 4: And it's also like there's so many things to actually
Speaker 4: be mad about, and a lot of the stuff that's
Speaker 4: you know, it's like some celebrity sets something done. It's
Speaker 4: like do do we care? Does does this matter?
Speaker 2: Does? Like?
Speaker 4: I think one of the things that drives me personally
Speaker 4: nuts about all of it is that there's no sense
Speaker 4: of scale. It's like everything is presented as equally and
Speaker 4: maximally enraging, when actually there are some things that matter
Speaker 4: a lot. Most things matter very little or nothing at all,
Speaker 4: and we're taught that, you know, we should all be
Speaker 4: as mad as possible about all of it all the time.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean, like you went off Twitter a
Speaker 3: few years ago. Congratulations, thank you so much, thank you,
Speaker 3: thank you.
Speaker 2: I'm so much.
Speaker 4: I how it would turn me into like a genius
Speaker 4: and like a like a great happy person and it
Speaker 4: you know, just I'm wasting just a little less time,
Speaker 4: right right.
Speaker 3: But I mean, like I definitely like I'm kind of
Speaker 3: exit only on there now and is that right. I
Speaker 3: just like will.
Speaker 4: Post stuff I need to post for you get in.
Speaker 3: Day's or something. But that has made my life a
Speaker 3: little definitely a little bit you realize that Twitter is not.
Speaker 4: The world, right, right, And I mean I got off
Speaker 4: because like, I don't know if you had this experience,
Speaker 4: but it was like as soon as the pandemic started,
Speaker 4: you know, and my life shrank to you know, one
Speaker 4: room in a weekly trip to the grocery store, and
Speaker 4: the Internet ballooned to fill the rest of my existence.
Speaker 4: And I was like this, this sucks, you know, like
Speaker 4: the Internet is never supposed to be bigger than your life,
Speaker 4: and when the pandemic made it bigger than actual physical life,
Speaker 4: I was like, I gotta, I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 3: Twitter is such a cesspool now, it's so negative, there's
Speaker 3: is there any way to unravel this?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 4: I think that as long as these companies the primary
Speaker 4: way they make their money is for us to spend
Speaker 4: as much time as possible on them. And the best way,
Speaker 4: as you were saying in that segment, for us for
Speaker 4: them to ensure that we spend as much time on
Speaker 4: them as possible is through all of the emotions that
Speaker 4: make us feel as bad as possible, self righteousness and
Speaker 4: anger and you know, everyone getting as mad as possible
Speaker 4: as a group about something you're going to forget about
Speaker 4: the next day. As long as that is the economic model,
Speaker 4: there is no hope. But I think, you know, again,
Speaker 4: as with the corporations that we're you know, making all
Speaker 4: the fish dye in the rivers, you can make them change.
Speaker 2: We could regulate this.
Speaker 3: Right if we put pressure on our government.
Speaker 1: Or yeah, I mean I think our government.
Speaker 3: Is like, how does also nursing at the teet of
Speaker 3: big tech.
Speaker 4: I think, like one, I think one thing that's necessary
Speaker 4: is for people to remember that we can you know,
Speaker 4: we don't have to feel like yeah yeah, like the internet.
Speaker 4: We all feel insane on the Internet. We all feel
Speaker 4: so bad all the time. And that's just the way
Speaker 4: it is, right. I think that I think that we
Speaker 4: it is we are capable of getting as mad about
Speaker 4: this as people did about in the environmental move in
Speaker 4: the seventies, right, like we're we are capable of generating
Speaker 4: pressure and putting it on lawmakers and there you know,
Speaker 4: there are things like you could end automated recommendations, right.
Speaker 4: Automated recommendations are the reasons that you know, a mom
Speaker 4: of two in Cleveland, you know, starts looking up smoothie
Speaker 4: recipes for her two year old and ends up believing
Speaker 4: that wayfair is shipping, you know, like orphans in their things,
Speaker 4: and you know, the wild designed theoreticalize exactly right, and
Speaker 4: and so much of that, so much of that is
Speaker 4: automated recommendations because that and people have been recommending for
Speaker 4: years for that, you know, simply ending those those are
Speaker 4: one of the biggest reasons that the Internet has gotten
Speaker 4: so much worse, so much less fun, so much less surprising,
Speaker 4: is because these companies just identify the kind of person
Speaker 4: you and then funnel you towards, you know, whatever the
Speaker 4: worst version of that person is.
Speaker 3: YouTube is bizarre. You know. One time I made the
Speaker 3: mistake of going like, what is this globalization? Like globalists?
Speaker 3: What do they mean by globalists? And I became an
Speaker 3: anti semi Right, it's been like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's amazing how well it works, you know, and
Speaker 4: there are things like, you know, you could end legal
Speaker 4: immunity for these companies if violence is caused by something
Speaker 4: that was generated on these platforms. The worst that actual
Speaker 4: offline life is the more people spend on the internet, right,
Speaker 4: And we just have really done very little in terms
Speaker 4: of public policy to make actual life better for people, right,
Speaker 4: to give people more money and more freedom, and to
Speaker 4: give people free public spaces to hang out so the
Speaker 4: only place so it's not like the only place they
Speaker 4: hang out is the internet. You know, We've done so
Speaker 4: little to improve actual life that I think is one
Speaker 4: of the things that drives people over and over to
Speaker 4: just be like yeah, you know, like for hours time,
Speaker 4: and I mean I feel like a boomer saying that,
Speaker 4: but I feel like that that would help a lot.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, it's like I feel like social media originally was
Speaker 3: designed or its intention was to connect, right, to connect people,
Speaker 3: But instead I think it's kind of put us in silos,
Speaker 3: and it's given us this existential like do I exist?
Speaker 3: You know, I mean even on selfies, I feel like
Speaker 3: are are just a constant question of do I exist?
Speaker 3: I exist?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: And you know it's interesting, but there's anger. You know,
Speaker 3: people make money from our anger, they get clicks from anger.
Speaker 3: But there's some good anger on the internet where people
Speaker 3: are organizing, right, you know, So how do you not
Speaker 3: how do you differentiate? But how do you keep the
Speaker 3: good anger and get us away from the the shitty.
Speaker 4: Angle what you were saying about connection, It's like we
Speaker 4: the version of connection that is generated through hate is
Speaker 4: not a kind of connection that makes sense in real life.
Speaker 4: It's it's only a kind of connection that is incentivized
Speaker 4: and sounds good on the internet, right, like in real
Speaker 4: life where we actually like, oh I want to spend
Speaker 4: six hours like phase deep in, you know, in the
Speaker 4: business of someone I hate, no, right, like we form
Speaker 4: we do our business based on like affinity and the
Speaker 4: things that we care about and the things that we
Speaker 4: like positively want. And I think about, you know, as
Speaker 4: much as I think the Internet as it's structured right
Speaker 4: now is kind of inevitably an existential and civic that
Speaker 4: negative that there are still these things. I mean, you
Speaker 4: think about the protests summer twenty twenty, They wouldn't have
Speaker 4: turned into what they became, right with like a quarter
Speaker 4: of Americans, you know, hitting the streets at some point
Speaker 4: if it wasn't for like a continual stream of videos
Speaker 4: on Twitter of police brutalizing the protesters at the police
Speaker 4: brutality protests right like these, there is still like radical potential.
Speaker 4: You think about what people are doing with abortion access
Speaker 4: right now on the internet, you know, forming these underground
Speaker 4: networks and getting people to travel across state lines and
Speaker 4: making sure anyone can get pills them. You know, I
Speaker 4: try to remember that, you know, we still can and
Speaker 4: will try to be human on you know, within a
Speaker 4: mechanism that wants us to be less so and we
Speaker 4: can keep doing it.
Speaker 3: Well let's Seeah, it's like the Wild West. But the
Speaker 3: leaders are billionaires and I mean everything, I feel like,
Speaker 3: every single thing, every conversation I've had here. I feel
Speaker 3: like boils down to Citizens United, because as long as
Speaker 3: people can line politicians pockets, they're buying policy and our
Speaker 3: votes don't. I mean, your vote counts, and don't.
Speaker 4: Our votes just simply don't count.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's it's very frustrating. It doesn't. It's clearly
Speaker 3: not right, like you know, but of course they name
Speaker 3: it Citizens Unit. It sounds beautiful. Let's hold for the siren.
Speaker 3: I'm just kidding to show that I'm in show business
Speaker 3: and I know how things work.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and I think part of it. I mean,
Speaker 4: we see this pushback now, right, there is a fomenting
Speaker 4: sort of pushback and a dissatisfaction, and you know, the
Speaker 4: hope is that it bubbles over into actual pressure on
Speaker 4: lawmakers to do something. But you know, for a long time,
Speaker 4: we accepted the general model of Silicon Valley, the move fast,
Speaker 4: break things sort of move faster than regulation could ever
Speaker 4: get you. We accepted that as like, oh, that's amazing,
Speaker 4: we could you know that that will result in us
Speaker 4: pressing a button and getting like, you know, a car
Speaker 4: at our doorstep, and you know, and any kind of
Speaker 4: food we want, Like we've we for a really long
Speaker 4: time accepted the conveniences that the internet economy provides us sluts.
Speaker 4: We're such little thoughts are convenient, and then they just
Speaker 4: and then they just snap those little handcuffs of anger
Speaker 4: around us, and here we are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you go like, uh, iPhones are made by child labor.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna, well, you know, let's stay yeah, yeah, less
Speaker 3: click to or yeah or Amazon. You know, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: you know, I was like, no, no one's boycotting Amazon.
Speaker 3: It's too convenient.
Speaker 4: Yeah. But the thing is you can And I think
Speaker 4: that like the real first step in all of this
Speaker 4: is remembering like we I mean, I have to have
Speaker 4: it's very ORWELLI and I have a program called self
Speaker 4: control on my computer and a program called freedom on
Speaker 4: my phone, and those things because I have neither and
Speaker 4: both and both of those things lock me off of
Speaker 4: social media for like fifteen hours a day. And I
Speaker 4: have needed to do that because I'm such a little
Speaker 4: slut for all the things that makes me mad. And
Speaker 4: it does work, like you can just refuse to participate
Speaker 4: in little little bits until maybe suddenly your life has
Speaker 4: changed a little. And I would I would recommend you know,
Speaker 4: it's it's worth a dry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I mean they say, like, of course nobody
Speaker 3: can sleep because you're on your phones. You've got to
Speaker 3: turn the screens off, and I'm like, yeah, but also
Speaker 3: no that.
Speaker 4: I prefer to drop my phone on my forehead seven
Speaker 4: times and that is when I go to sleep.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, how do we fix the Internet? Is there
Speaker 3: any hope in all of this?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I think in regulation, and I think in
Speaker 4: public pushback, and I think in all of us spending
Speaker 4: less time on our phone. Whether that means refusing convenience,
Speaker 4: you know, certain things that are convenience, I think it
Speaker 4: means I think all of these things are possible, but
Speaker 4: we have to maybe accept that in order to resist
Speaker 4: social media, in order to resist the constant surveillance that's
Speaker 4: hitting us on our phone, that all these companies are
Speaker 4: like tracking and reselling to other companies to make money
Speaker 4: off of everything we do, we have to maybe we
Speaker 4: have to maybe refuse a little bit of the cheap
Speaker 4: pleasure and the convenience that the phone gives us. But
Speaker 4: I think we can all.
Speaker 3: Right, of trick mirror is invariable.
Speaker 1: If you're like me, your life is both owned and
Speaker 1: ruined by technology. So I want to talk to someone
Speaker 1: about how to break free from it all. Even though
Speaker 1: I've made a career of standing in front of screens
Speaker 1: and flailing my arms, I have.
Speaker 5: A secret to tell all of you.
Speaker 1: I hate technology. Every new gizmo and gadget claims to
Speaker 1: be highly useful and easy to use. But if that
Speaker 1: were true, then why are we so frustrated by technology
Speaker 1: all the goddamn time? I decided to sit down with
Speaker 1: Marquees Brownlee aka MKBHD, who's been heralded as the greatest
Speaker 1: tech reviewer on planet Earth, bringing us endless videos of
Speaker 1: the newest high tech piece of shit. But could he
Speaker 1: convince me to join his technomania cult? Marquez, you are
Speaker 1: like the Kim Kardashian of technology. What you say moves product,
Speaker 1: and you do have a lot of junk in your
Speaker 1: trunk to review.
Speaker 2: Has that been said?
Speaker 5: Or are you just yeah, I'm proposing that. I like
Speaker 5: that you have dedicated your life to reviewing technology.
Speaker 2: Why there's a quote you've probably heard. Any sufficiently advanced
Speaker 2: technology is indistinguishable from magic if you have a certain
Speaker 2: expectation and the tech actually gives you that output you expect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like that?
Speaker 2: That working? I love that.
Speaker 5: And when it doesn't work, what does it feel?
Speaker 2: Incredibly frustrating to me?
Speaker 5: It feels like an abomination to society.
Speaker 2: It's correct.
Speaker 5: Yeah, here's my problem. My brain is melting right now
Speaker 5: because I have to juggle one hundred apps just to
Speaker 5: communicate with eight people. When I was in college, there
Speaker 5: were three ways to get a hold of me. Okay,
Speaker 5: call me if you're confident, text me if you're shy,
Speaker 5: email me if you're smart. Now it's one hundred apps.
Speaker 5: I Message Friends, Android, annoying Friends, Signal, pretentious college friends, WhatsApp,
Speaker 5: annoying family members, Instagram, DMS, corny randos, Twitter, DMS, angry
Speaker 5: political randos, evite psychos, paperless posts, liberal psychos. That's just messaging. Marquez.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you do have the option to not try
Speaker 2: any of the things you don't.
Speaker 5: Want until I go to a restaurant and you go, hey,
Speaker 5: can I get a menu?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: And they go, oh yeah, just scan the QR code
Speaker 5: and I go, no, no, I went to this restaurant to
Speaker 5: avoid being on my phone. And then they're like, oh,
Speaker 5: you have to also pay through your phone. In order
Speaker 5: to do that, you have to create a username and password.
Speaker 2: Oh, Okay, so do you see what I'm saying?
Speaker 5: You just made this. I'll have the tuna melt six
Speaker 5: steps harder.
Speaker 2: There's a Goldilock zone of like going a little bit
Speaker 2: into tech and seeing real benefit before going too far.
Speaker 2: But we got to try a whole bunch of bad
Speaker 2: ideas before we find one or two cool things house
Speaker 2: and might.
Speaker 1: Like Marquez wanted to prove to me that tech could
Speaker 1: be useful and user friendly by doing what he's known
Speaker 1: for a product demo. Secretly, I suspected it would turn
Speaker 1: into an episode of this shit Doesn't Work. These new
Speaker 1: tech enhanced products were a smart toothbrush, smart hover shoes,
Speaker 1: and a smart printer. And of course, all of these
Speaker 1: were supposed to be as easy as one, two three.
Speaker 5: Sure, right, let's.
Speaker 2: See lean sally forward to move forward, slightly backward, to
Speaker 2: go backwards, and step off to get up. Okay, smart toothbrush,
Speaker 2: it's got a ton of sensors and it might be
Speaker 2: able to shed some light on something you can do better.
Speaker 5: All right, let's see how easy it is? Sure, look
Speaker 5: at that sticker reminding you how easy it is. You're
Speaker 5: gonna plug it in right here, right, all right? What
Speaker 5: is it yeah, all right, back to the future.
Speaker 2: I can't believe there's the straps just twist me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: where are you opening up? Somewhere around there we go.
Speaker 5: There's a tab, you know, because the sticker says effortless.
Speaker 5: Wait wait wait wait wait, why is it going to?
Speaker 2: Why is it possessed.
Speaker 3: It?
Speaker 2: I connect this to app right, alright, app store app.
Speaker 5: The problem is that I just don't want my dentist
Speaker 5: to have even more info about me. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 5: I haven't been brushing the full happy birthday.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry.
Speaker 2: It says do not turn the power off until the
Speaker 2: initialization is complete. This takes about six minutes, So you're
Speaker 2: just gonna stay here for six minutes.
Speaker 1: Where do I apply?
Speaker 5: So if I apply through?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we have to make an account. We do
Speaker 2: have to type a wife password. There's your key word.
Speaker 1: See kind of type.
Speaker 2: By the way, there's capital work.
Speaker 5: I have to switch between uppercase and lowercase and then down,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 1: Relationships time because of stuff like that.
Speaker 2: One, I'll set up my own account. You're gonna use
Speaker 2: your full government name. Yeah, I'm gonna do exactly what
Speaker 2: it asked me to. I cook my book, man, I
Speaker 2: give it a password and then you just straighten your feet.
Speaker 2: How do you feel? I feel like a baby giraffe
Speaker 2: to connect with the pass one? Yeah? You want a
Speaker 2: password again? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Can you sign it to me?
Speaker 2: Unable to register your user? Please try?
Speaker 3: This is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Try again.
Speaker 2: What does it say? Now? It doesn't work? You know what? Man?
Speaker 1: How do I get off?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: You know it's not your thing. It's my thing.
Speaker 2: Bro Oh you don't to Please try one more time?
Speaker 2: Third time? It doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Log and fail, log and fail? And where what is
Speaker 1: the print? Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, let's have our final products,
Speaker 1: shall we?
Speaker 5: I mean, shit doesn't work.
Speaker 4: It doesn't work.
Speaker 2: It didn't work.
Speaker 1: I felt like I had just proved to Marquez that
Speaker 1: his entire life was a lie. But he had a
Speaker 1: slightly different perspective.
Speaker 2: The goal of tech is really to just work every
Speaker 2: time and be as easy as possible. So I would
Speaker 2: just say to have patience with the things that don't
Speaker 2: work yet, because maybe they will soon hook print users
Speaker 2: just good blocks s gruners are doing.
Speaker 1: So maybe the way to fix shitty modern technology is
Speaker 1: by becoming more patient and understanding users. Why did you lie?
Speaker 3: Here's an app?
Speaker 2: Ope and can.
Speaker 1: Cloth as you can close. This shit doesn't Why? Thank
Speaker 1: you Marquez. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast
Speaker 1: universe by by searching The Daily Show wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Watch The Daily Show weeknights at eleven.
Speaker 1: Ten Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime
Speaker 1: on Fairmount Plus.
Speaker 5: This has been a Comedy Central podcast.
Speaker 4: Wow.