Nobel Prize Lecture -- Maria Ressa, Co-Winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

I heard Maria Ressa interviewed this morning as part of an International Women's Day event. The bad news (the embarrassing news) is that I've never heard of her before. Somehow, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to two journalists last fall didn't hit my radar screen. The good news is that now I have heard of her and listened to her impassioned plea for truth in journalism, destruction of the disinformation machine, and reining in of social media.

After the brief and impressive interview this morning, I went in search of her Nobel lecture to learn more. Wow!! She is articulate, impassioned, and persuasive. And she is courageous. It is one thing to plead for the protection of truth in journalism in "the West," where you might suffer significant bullying both online and IRL. It is a whole different thing to make that plea in a society where going to jail for what you write and say is a reality. 

Ressa is of course critical of countries like her native Philippines that regularly threaten journalists with imprisonment or government sanctioned violence. She tearfully listed fellow journalists who have recently died or been imprisoned around the world. But Ressa reserves her strongest criticism for the tech algorithms that come out of Silicon Valley. She calls it a behavior modification system that encourages fear, hate, and bigotry in the service of surveillance capitalism than monetizes our clicks.

I can't begin to do justice to her powerful speech. I plan to come back to it here whenever I find myself wondering if Facebook is really so bad. 

Quote of the Day -- Tim Cook

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform...

At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible...

It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost — of polarization, of lost trust and, yes, of violence.

A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe.

-- Tim Cook

Quote of the Day -- Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Social media has changed the lives of millions of Americans with a suddenness and force that few expected. The question is whether those changes might invalidate assumptions made by Madison and the other Founders as they designed a system of self-governance. Compared with Americans in the 18th century—and even the late 20th century—citizens are now more connected to one another, in ways that increase public performance and foster moral grandstanding, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious, all while focusing people’s minds on immediate conflicts and untested ideas, untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values that previously exerted a stabilizing effect. This, we believe, is why many Americans—and citizens of many other countries, too—experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.

-- Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, The Atlantic

Quote of the Day -- Eric Schmidt

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. 

-- Eric Schmidt

Quote of the Day -- Wendell Berry

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first. 

-- Wendell Berry

Quote of the Day -- Carl Sagan

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

-- Carl Sagan

Quote of the Day -- Daniel Kahneman

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. 

-- Daniel Kahneman

Quote of the Day -- Molly Wood

Data is a weapon that can be used in many ways. Facebook is the world's biggest arms dealer.

-- Molly Wood

Quote of the Day -- Gertrude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

-- Gertrude Stein

Quote of the Day -- Paul Smalera

Realize that we live in an era where news rockets around the globe in seconds, and bad news in particular comes with social media booster rockets. Yes, there are big, scary things, like the prospect of accidental nuclear war, that could wipe us out. But it’s no one’s moral obligation to martyr their emotional well-being in order to be plugged into the minute-by-minute developments of the goings-on of nearly 8 billion people. We can’t have empathy for the plight of our neighbors if we don’t first have empathy for ourselves.

-- Paul Smalera, Quartz

Quote of the Day -- Cathy O'Neil

It's the Age of the Algorithm and we have arrived unprepared.
-- Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe and author of Weapons of Math Destruction

Culture of Character versus Culture of Personality

I've been thinking a lot lately about the trend for personal branding. If you have any kind of professional role today, you have to invest some of your time and effort in your personal brand. At a minimum, you need to have a polished LinkedIn profile. Beyond that, you might need to develop a distinctive social media presence. I'm glad that my career-building days are over. I understand the need for personal branding in today's hyper-connected world, but I still find it vaguely disturbing.

In her wonderful book Quiet:The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain attributes the over-valuing of extroversion in our society, at least in part, to the transformation in the early twentieth century from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality.  She cites the work of Warren Susman, a cultural anthropologist, who describes the migration from the small town (where everyone knows your name and your character) to the big city (where you need to find a way to stand out).  The traits that were important in a small community are no longer sufficient to guarantee your success in the more anonymous urban world.

Cain draws a striking, somewhat stark, comparison between the attributes that are highlighted in self-help books in the two "cultures":

Culture of Character	Culture of Personality
Citizenship	Magnetism
Duty	Fascinating
Work	Stunning
Golden deeds	Attractive
Honor	Glowing
Reputation	Dominant
Morals	Forceful
Manners	Energetic
Integrity

The comparison seems a bit loaded, but also unfortunately fairly accurate. And it exposes the root of my discomfort with self-branding. When is self-promotion OK and necessary? When it is self-aggrandizement and just over the top? It is a balancing act. I admire the personal brands created by several people that I "follow" -- Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, Gretchen Rubin, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink are just a few examples. But each of them sometimes ventures over the line (in my opinion) because self-marketing is so necessary today. Contrast them with someone I've come to dislike because his personal brand is excessive -- James Patterson. And yet, his net worth probably exceeds everyone on my first list combined.

It's hard to see how we get back to a society where character is once again valued, a la David Brooks, but I certainly hope we make some progress in that direction.

Digital Disruption

People have bemoaned how fast the world is changing for as long as I can remember. I often marveled at the changes my parents (born in the early 1920's) saw in their lifetimes. The ubiquity of the automobile, air travel, television. And then computers, VCRs, microwaves, cell phones, the Internet. That's a lot to happen in 90 years, and they coped pretty well with the degree of change.

But the changes that technology has wrought in the last 10 to 15 years are of a completely different order of magnitude. Social media, crowd-sourcing, a modern "barter economy." Being connected all the time. The Internet of Things. When we talk about educating our children (or grandchildren), we often hear that the types of jobs many of them will have when they graduate from college don't even exist yet. 

I worked in technology of sorts for my entire career. I consider myself more tech-savvy than most of my contemporaries, but it is definitely a struggle. For most of my career, I could at least understand the value and use of technological advances, but that has become increasingly difficult. And I don't think it is only because I am older. We're seeing a veritable explosion in many many directions. Few people can begin to get their arms around all of it.

Take the list on the graphic above. I've only participated in a few of these (Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Google, Skype). I understand the basics of the others, except for SocietyOne. What in the world is a bank with no money? I struggle to explain the value of Facebook to friends just a few years older than I. And it took me a long time to appreciate how Twitter provides quite different value.

As I watch my grandchildren grow and embrace technology as a given, I wonder a lot about the world that will greet them when they enter college, or when they enter old age. And I wonder about the divide between the digital "have's" and "have not's." Will the gap be unbridgeable? And will the generation gap be similarly vast as our grandchildren reach adulthood. 

Digital disruption. Definitely.

Quote of the Day -- David Brooks

The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels.

-- David Brooks, The Road to Character

Quote of the Day -- David Samuels

What a wonderful turn of phrase...

"...at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press..."

David Samuels, NY Times article