Lessons - The Man Who Broke the FTX Story Explains How Big Tech Controls Your Brain | Michael Casey - Fmr WSJ Journalist & Co-Author of Our Biggest Fight

In this lessons episode, discover how the internet evolved into an algorithm-driven ecosystem that shapes attention and behavior. Understand why personal data has become a valuable digital asset. Explore how algorithms influence everyday decisions. And uncover why reclaiming control of digital identity is essential for protecting privacy and online freedom. You know, you mentioned that the first decentralized technology that you got interested in was the internet. So obviously you've been, you've been around for a while. You've, you've. Yeah. All right. Yes. Show me age. Okay. So let's, let's talk about how the internet's changed. Like, let's talk about what it was meant to be and how it's broken. So I think like. To think about the broken part, the journey that I've been on, and we've all been on it, by the way, but I think as a journalist whose career spanned really the pre-internet age to now, I used to literally write for a newspaper and the only vehicle we had to get that news out was a physical newspaper. It wasn't many years, by the way, I'm not that old, until it was quickly the internet came around and we had to think about that. But I like to, you know, think about what was happening at that point. And we were, first of all, excited. Wow, look at all this information that's available to us. And then not long down the path, you know, In the media industry, we started to think a little bit, oh my goodness, this could be a challenge to our business model. But the mindset we had at the time was, we're going to be competed out of this by bloggers and citizen journalists and a whole range of new free-to-air website-based services. that are just going to be able to do this so much more cheaply than we can. And I was always conflicted by my concerns because I was thinking, you know what, but this is probably good for democracy, you know, having all the more voices out there who are able to contribute and weigh in on the big sort of public discourse. So I was like, you know what, we're going to live with this. But come, you know, as we say, the app era, this is post, you know, the World Wide Web, the dot-com boom, and all of a sudden, Facebook and Twitter, the social media phenomenons were there. And, you know, I'd been just... doing my dutiful job of writing an article or two or three or four every day. And then suddenly I was also having to put blog posts out and then podcasts and then TV. And then most importantly, I was having to tweet. And we were all encouraged to be on social media because we had to fight to keep the eyeballs on us. Must compete in the internet attention grabbing game, right? Why? Because the platforms were now constantly... pushing us everywhere else. And then you start to realize that, you know, you're actually competing, yeah, not with these alternative news outlets, but with the algorithm itself. Because Facebook wanted your eyeballs for their own advertisers, not for us. And then when you think one step further and you look at the phenomenon that maybe some of your readers and viewers will be aware of, SEO, the famous search engine optimization concept. And anybody in media, I'm sure you will, has to play this game, right? It's figuring out what headlines. It's changed everything, right? But what are you doing in that process? You're trying to write the optimal, catchy thing to keep an algorithm happy. Because you probably also have seen in your immediate operation, like, wow, why is this thing not getting any attention right now? Oh, Google, Google tweaked the algorithm. Of course, but it's not just that it's a social and you're like figuring out what's the latest dance that I got to do on TikTok. So it's all about the algorithm. It is, right? So we like to talk in the book about how the algorithm, in fact, is actually a combination of two factors. It's the little software that is written to perform a certain repeated task. But the other half of it is actually biological, right? It's whatever it is that's clicking in our brains that we're responding to. And if that's not getting enough engagement, then the algorithm itself will tweak to find the next thing that it is. And that becomes the reiterated, iterative thing. So these algorithms are one part software, one part biological. And that's really what's kind of scary about it. This is a human hack that's been going on for 20 years. So you sort of realize that as a journalist and you're like, what am I doing? Why are we even doing this? This is the moment that I think I really realized that. In fact, I think probably the big aha moment of how broken it truly was, was in 2016. And there was a famous article on BuzzFeed about this website that these kids, literally teenagers in Macedonia had created in the middle of the, you know, a very fraught US election at that time. And they'd figured out that to generate a flywheel effect of ongoing shares and retweets and likes and everything that you need to get engagement in this social media environment, all they had to do was just to make stuff up and land it in a very highly passionate, driven group on Facebook. So... 2016, if you wrote an article, as these guys did, of Obama's birth certificate found in Kenya, or Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump. Or in fact, there was also some that were actually far more targeted at liberals, right? That would say like mass migration from the US to Ireland, Trump flight migration patterns and all these sorts of things, none of which were happening. But because they triggered what people wanted to know amongst their very closed echo chamber, Facebook framed groups, they got enormous traction. So think about this, right? I was working at the Wall Street Journal at the time. We had an editor-in-chief. Below him was a deputy editor. Then there was a whole line of sub-editors. I had my own managing editor. We had lawyers. We had buildings. We gave people security clearances to go to wars. The cost of building and working on finding the truth And ensuring that that truth was delivered was enormous to actually establish and stand up what we were doing. And we were now being competed out of it by a bunch of kids in Macedonia who'd figured out how to game the algorithm better than we could with complete and utter lies. So obviously, you know, social media platforms, they take advantage of that because that's what drives engagement. It drives viewership. The commercial model is the more people on the platform, the more money we make because they're not selling a product or service. So they've massively capitalized, not just social, like a lot of big tech. Government doesn't keep up with legislation. Government's actually participating in the process, not necessarily out of any nefarious entity, but they all have to, right? They've got to play the same social media. Because they use that social for their own benefit. Right. So politicians are all themselves participating in the same system. And you have some examples, like you have CCPA and GDPR where they're trying to, but it's still slow. So now this is like the central thesis is we got to do something better. We got to rebuild. I think the way we look at things like those two, well-meaning and obviously earnest and important acts, the Californian and the European one, was that, look, trying to solve the right problem, but actually still not low enough down in the stack, right? They're dealing with the surface level problem. Our argument is it's the control of the data that enables those breaches of privacy, that enables the controls that have to be, that need to be addressed. And the solution that we're addressing in this book is... the idea that we can build protocol, a specific protocol that enables the individual to control their data, to determine who gets to see what, when and how, their own online activity, their posts, their content, their tracking, everything. and bringing that into your control so that this concept of your social graph, which is really the most valuable part of – a social graph is this complex network, this web of relationships that you've built over time with all of your interactions with everybody, with every institution, with every app, right? That story is incredibly valuable. That's what they use to sell to advertisers. That's what they use to sell data. Because from out of that, they extract information about who you are, what your likes are, what your dislikes are, and that becomes incredibly valuable to advertisers. So all of that information is hidden. It is you. We make the point, and this is, I think, one of the most important things we need to start thinking about today. that that data is rightfully yours on moral grounds, that this is actually a human right. Because in the digital age, where all of our lives are online and all being tracked in this way, the distinction between your physical personhood and your digital personhood, for all intents and purposes, has completely disappeared. So the control of that data should rightfully be yours. We want people to rise up and demand this because that's the human rights aspects of this. Because I don't think people think about it until there is a Cambridge Analytica. Right. I don't think people actually are cognizant and aware of the fact that they're being. Because it's designed not to be cognizant. Exactly. Right? It's not meant to be intrusive. So I think one of the problems we also face is we all believe that we are in control. We like to believe we're in control. Right. No one would say, oh, I choose what I read. I'm not being told. But, you know, it's well and truly well established how our dopamine release function works from our adrenal gland and our heads. Right. This is now a very well established chemical fact that this machinery we have in our own brains, which stems from these primitive, you know, fight and flight instincts that go way back to, you know, the early stages of evolution, right? that are now there are always doing these things. There's Anna Lemke, a tremendous psychiatrist that's worked in the realm of addiction, just does very, very well explaining how the dopamine process works. She says that social media is far more extreme than all of this, and that once it's put in your pocket in the form of an iPhone, it is the equivalent of a hypodermic needle in your pocket. So as much as we all like to think we're in control, we're not. And if that's the case, then, you know, then this isn't a breach of our free will. This is an abuse of who we are. So recognizing that is hard. But once we do, we need to take it back. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.