The Right to Turn off the Algorithm
Today Jack Dorsey posted a very thoughtful and noble open letter. Basically taking responsibility for everything in the Twitter Files. Although in my opinion from reading the Twitter Files the thing he was most guilty of was being asleep at the wheel and maybe being to accommodating to a very strong willed staff. Right now I think he is making another mistake by not rolling up his sleeves and helping Twitter unwind the ball of wire he help tie.
“The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.”
A reflecting Dorsey goes on to lament his role in inventing powerful moderation tools that were so tempting to use. Now he champions bottom-up self-management instead of a top-down-mother-knows-best approach. He wants to resist the lure of government and media wanting to use the power of social media towards their own ends. To achieve this he has 3 bullet points:
Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
Only the original author may remove content they produce.
Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
“Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all.”
Number 3 is my focus here. I totally agree with the bottom-up, user-controlled, and curated experience but the ability to turn off the All Mighty Algorithm is gold. To see the world as it really is is a grounding experience.
While driving Lyft I noticed something while doing a pickup in a majority-white area of town the app had me travel 30 minutes out of the way to pick up a black person. I’m sure the algorithm picked them from what it thought we both would prefer as driver and passenger, but, this got me thinking. Personal customization will mean the world will become more segregated and siloed not less. Every company wants you to use their app. So they are going to make it cater to you in every way possible so you will use it more. The incentive is not diversity or tolerance but to put you at the center of the world. We will never know because this is our preference, and if your version of reality is all you see then that’s how you will interpret the world.
Most problems occur because everyone wants to shape the world in their image. Dead is the idea of the commons and shared spaces. We even customize our parks: dog parks. There is nothing really wrong with where this is going but I fear we are losing something, a life lesson maybe, that there are cats in this world that like parks too (a silly analogy I know). The commons taught us that you can’t have everything your way, there are people different from you with different ideas, customs, and priorities; we must coexist and find a way to get along. It is healthy to have a community and it is also healthy to know other communities exist and rub shoulders with them from time to time.
The right to turn off the algorithm will be a type of nod to the tradition of the ever-shrinking commons.