How the Internet's Business Model Impacts Society with Tim Hwang

Oscillations

In our last episode, we talked about cognitive technologies, or behaviors that shape our capacities to think, communicate, and imagine. Cultural artifacts like language, visual drawings, math, and art are cognitive technologies because they allow us to link our minds together and invent new ideas that go beyond what any one mind could do on its own. They allow us to stabilize and share ideas across space and time to build increasingly complex tools, systems, and societies.

Today, humans are at a point in society where we’re creating things that we don't understand. A few decades ago, it was said we’d reached a point where no one individual could understand things we were starting to build, such as how computers work. Instead, it took a group of specialized experts to jointly piece together new technologies we were inventing. In the past few years, with increasingly complex artificial intelligence technologies, we’ve crossed another threshold: we’ve built things that nobody can fully understand - not even groups of experts.

Unlocking this Pandora's box has created a positive feedback loop: In order to coordinate the collective interactions of new, complicated technologies, we must develop even more complicated systems. Ironically, many of the technologies are intended to simplify our lives - to allow us to more easily connect with one another, manage our finances, and order our groceries. But the speed at which new technologies are evolving in fact further complicates our lives. This is one of the major paradoxes of the 21st Century. (“Hashtag disruption!”)

Today we’re talking with Tim Hwang about one of the most pervasive examples of these technologies. It’s the one that underlies the entire business model of the internet. And it’s having a profound effect on human behavior at a global scale. We’re talking about programmatic advertising.

Tim is a writer, researcher, and currently the general counsel at Substack. He’s the author of The Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the online advertising bubble that we’ll be discussing today. He’s also a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a board member of Meedan, a non-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information. Previously he’s served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google, as well as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest.

The ideas we’ll cover are a bit jargonized and technical, but their implications are extremely broad and important. Tim believes we’re in danger of another economic collapse, perhaps even orders of magnitude larger than the 2008 mortgage crisis.

Given the technical nature of the topic, we’re going to first review the main arguments in Tim’s book and then ask him to connect his ideas to the themes we think about at Oscillations. We encourage our listeners to read The Subprime Attention Crisis, since there’s a lot of information that we won’t be able to cover in our conversation today.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
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