use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency.

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Instagram did not exist!

Back in 2018, I explained this dynamic to Facebook’s head of NewsFeed, warning him that when BuzzFeed creates “meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded...the content that is working isn’t our best content” and I explained that the “entire digital media industry is faced with this dilemma. Do you make negative and polarizing content to win on... See more

But the bigger loss of human agency comes from the billions of people that use these apps. These deep learning AIs are designed to maximize the time we all spend on these apps. While you are reading this memo, you are probably jonesing to switch over to Instagram or TikTok. It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI... See more