Name: What China's Crackdown on Algorithm's Means for the US
Uploaded: 2021-11-18T19:03:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What China's Crackdown on Algorithm's Means for the US' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What China's Crackdown on Algorithm's Means for the US' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-18. Transcript available.

You were just mentioning what China is doing to kind of regulate its internet.
That's really worth speaking about.
Yeah.
Have you been following this?
Yeah.
That's what terrifies me, is that we have to become like China in order to deal
with
what they're doing.
I just feel like one step moving in that general direction is a social credit
score
system.
And I'm terrified of that.
And I think that that is where vaccine passports lead to.
I really do.
I think this idea that they're slowly working their way into our everyday lives
in this
sort of inexorable way where you have to have some sort of paperwork or some
sort of a Q
code or something on your phone or QR code.
That scares the shit out of me because you're never going to get that back.
Once the government has that kind of power and control, they're going to be
able to exercise
it whenever they want with all sorts of reasons to institute it.
I'm worried about that too, but I will say also just to also notice that
everywhere there's
a way in which a small move in a direction can be shown to lead to another big
boogeyman
and that boogeyman makes us angry.
Social media is upregulating the meaning of everything to be its worst possible
conclusion.
So like a small move by the government to do X might be seen as this is the
first step in this total thing.
I'm not saying that they're not going to go do that.
I'm worried about that too.
But to also just notice the way that social media amplifies the degree to which
we all get kind of reactive and triggered by that.
The thing that I think is worth mentioning is what China is doing regarding its
internet because it's seeing real problems.
And we might not like their solution.
We might want to implement a solution that has more civil liberties and we
should.
Well, let's explain what they're doing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'll do it quickly.
So it's almost it's quite literally as if Xi Jinping saw the social dilemma
because they've in the last two months rolled out a bunch of sweeping reforms
that include things like if you're under the age of 14 and you use Douyin,
which is their version of TikTok, when you swipe the videos instead of getting
like the influencer dancing videos and soft pornography, you get science
experiments.
You can do at home, museum exhibits and patriotism videos.
Wow.
So you're scrolling and you're getting stuff that's educating because they want
their kids to grow up and want to be astronauts and scientists.
Yeah.
They don't want them to grow up and be influencers.
And I'm not when I say this, by the way, I'm not just to be clear, I'm not
praising that model, just noticing all the things that they're doing.
Well, I'll praise it.
If you're going to influence people, that's a great way to do it.
They also limit it to three hours, sorry, 40 minutes a day on TikTok for gaming.
Let me actually do the TikTok example.
So they do 40 minutes a day for TikTok.
They also, when you scroll a few times, they actually do a mandatory five
second delay saying, hey, do you want to get up and do something else?
Like because when people sit there infinitely scroll, even Tim Cook recently
said mindless scrolling, which is actually invented by my co-founder of the
Center for Humane Technology, Aza Raskin.
He was in the Social Dilemma, he was the one who invented that infinite scroll
thing.
China said, hey, we don't want people mindlessly scrolling.
So after you scroll a few videos, it does a mandatory five second interlude.
They also have opening hours and closing hours.
So from 10 p.m. until six in the morning, if you're under 14, it's like it's
closed, meaning one of the problems of social media for teenagers is if I'm not
on at one in the morning, but all my friends are on and they're still
commenting on my stuff.
I feel the social pressure.
I'm going to be ostracized if I don't participate.
And if your notifications are on, your phone keeps buzzing.
Totally.
And even if they're not on, it's like, oh, but I want to see if they said
something about my thing.
And so it's a, we call it a multipolar trap.
If I don't participate, but the other guys are, I'm going to lose out.
And Facebook and these companies, they know that, by the way.
Even Netflix said their biggest competitor is sleep.
So one of the, because they're all competing for attention.
So when you do this mandatory thing where you say we're going to close from 10
p.m. to six in the morning,
suddenly everyone, if you're in the same time zone, it's another important side
effect,
can't use it at the same time.
So these are some examples.
For their military, by the way, when you, if you're a member of the Chinese PLA
army,
you get a locked down smartphone.
It's like a light phone.
It's like hyper locked down.
You can't do anything.
By contrast, we know that Russia and China go into our veterans groups on
Facebook
and they actually try to sow disinformation, try to radicalize veterans.
Hey, Afghanistan happened.
Don't you really piss?
Let me show you 10 videos, right?
And this is like dosing people with more mental health problems.
So in a bunch of different ways, we see that-
Specifically, if you want to drive civil war in a meaningful way in the U.S.,
take the people who have real tactical capability and radicalize them.
And so target those groups in particular.
And that's like, that's, it makes sense why their military wants to lock down
the ability
for external influence.
Of course.
Yeah.
And so while we're, you know, spending all this money building physical borders,
building
walls or, you know, spending $50 billion a year on the passport controls and
the Department
of Homeland Security and the physical, you know, Russia trying to try to fly a
plane in the
United States.
We've got Patriot missiles to shoot it down.
But when they try to fly an information, like precision guided information bomb,
we, instead
of responding with Patriot missiles, we respond with, here's a white glove
Facebook algorithm
that says, which zip code or Facebook group would you like to target?
Right?
So it changes the asymmetries.
Typically what made us power, what made the U.S. powerful was the geographic,
you know,
we had these huge oceans on both sides.
It gives us a unique, you know, place in the world.
When you move to the digital world, it erases that geographic asymmetry of
power.
So this is a imminent national security threat.
This is not just like, hey, social media is adding some subtle pollution in the
form of
mental health or, hey, it's adding a little bit of polarization, but we can
still get
things done.
It's an imminent national security threat to our continuity of our model of
governance, which
we want to keep.
Have you spoken to people in power?
Have you spoken to Congress people about this?
Yes, but I'm hoping many more of them watch this, because I think people need
to see the
full scope.
And I really do want to make sure we're not sounding like just full disaster
porn, because
we want to get to the point.
Don't worry about that.
Go full disaster porn.
Better that than not.
It's not meant to scare people.
Just to get an appraisal of what is the situation that we're in.
It's going to scare.
The reality is going to scare people.
Reality is scary.
It should scare people, because we're so far behind the eight ball.
There's a really important point Tristan was just at that we actually need to
double click
on, which is that democracies are more affected by what's happening with social
media than
authoritarian nations are.
And for a number of reasons.
But do you want to?
Well, and we sort of hinted at it earlier, but when social media's business
model is showing
each tribe their boogeyman, their extreme reality, it forces a more polarized
political
base, which means to get elected, you have to say something that's going to
appeal to a
base that's more divided.
And in the Facebook files that Francis Haugen put out, they showed that when
Facebook changed
the way its ranking system worked in 2018 to something called meaningful social
interactions,
I won't go in the details, they talked to political parties in Europe.
So here we are, it's 2018.
They do an interview with political parties in Poland and Hungary and Taiwan
and India.
And these political parties say, Facebook, we know you changed your ranking
system.
And Facebook like smugly responds, yeah, everyone has a conspiracy theory about
how we change
our ranking system because those stories go viral.
And they're like, no, no, no.
But we know that you changed how your ranking system works because we used to
be able to
publish, here's a white paper on our agriculture policy to deal with like soil
degradation.
And now when we publish the white paper, we get crickets, we don't get any
response.
And we tested it.
And the only thing that we get traffic and attention on is when we say negative
things
about the other political parties.
So, and they say, we know that's bad.
We don't want to do that.
We don't want to like run our campaign that's about saying negative things
about the other
party.
But when you change the algorithm, that's the only thing we can do to get
attention.
It shows how central the algorithm is to everything else.
If I'm Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow or anybody who's a political personality,
are they
really saying things just for their TV audience?
Are they also appealing to the algorithm?
Because most, more and more of their attention is going to happen downstream in
these little
clips that get filtered around.
So they, they also need to appeal to how the algorithm is rewarding, saying
negative things
about the other party.
So what that does is it means you elect a more political representative class.
That's based on disagreeing with the other side and being divided about the
other side,
which means that it throws a gear into the rent, a wrench into the gears of
democracy and
means that democracy stops delivering results in a time where we have more
crisis.
We have more supply chain stuff and inflation and all these other things to
respond to.
And instead of responding effectively, it's just division all the way down.