"The end of social media as we know it?"

Jacob Ward in discussion with Nita Farahany.

 

 

In the wake of the New Mexico and California civil liability verdicts.

 

 

"The end of social media?" I guess we'll see. 'Not anytime soon' would be my speculation. Good discussion. I've cited both Nita and Jacob before.

 

My Grandson Calvin at 13 months, LOL.
He is now six. "Hey, Pop, can I use your iPhone?"

  

Baby brother Arlo, last week, 5 months.

Couple Jake and Nita's discussion above with that of Laurie Segall and Becky Kennedy in the prior post. Lotta good stuff to ponder. 

apropos...

ON DECK, COMES OUT MARCH 31ST:

 

Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.

Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.

No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.

Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

See "The man who thought he could keep AI safe." 

_______ 

 

CODA: GRATUITOUS MUCKING AROUND ON MY BLOG

 

Amid Donald Trump's recent nearly 2-hour long televised White House Cabinet Meeting, at 38:14 he launched into his trademark random mumbling grievance ramble. It lasted a little over 19 minutes. I had it up on my iPad via a YouTube feed. At one point I gripped the screen tightly with one hand while holding it at an angle. It went into 2x speed mode (without going into "Chipmunks"). It was funny, so I launched my voice memo app and re-rolled the video. After I got a decent audio take, I dropped the ensuing .mp4 file over to my Macbook, pulled it up in Garageband (I also have Logic Pro, but this was easier), clipped off the front and end loose matter, and exported it to an audio .mp3. I mounted it here, below. The dude is unreal.

Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 mid-cabinet meeting rant, 2x speed

The Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality

February 18th, 2026: Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is appearing in a Los Angeles courtroom today to testify in defense of his company regarding litigation asserting that his social media applications pose significant risk of harms (inclusive of suicide) to many users, from pre- and teenagers to psychologically vulnerable adults across all ages. The financial liability stakes could scarcely be higher (not only for Zuck's companies). Reporting has it that some 1,500 liability lawsuits are awaiting trial, with more in the wings.

The legal liability principle that finally caught up with Big Tobacco (in the wake of some 80 years of litigative and regulatory effort) was that of the 'Inherently Dangerous Instrumentality." In short, the product, used as intended and directed, inexorably leads to excessive customer harms—up to lethal outcomes. Social media companies' ad-based revenue/profitability models require maximization of user engagement. The impolite word is "addiction."

I would Quixotically favor expanding the analogy to firearms, notwithstanding it being admittedly a bit of a stretch (particularly in light of our 2nd Amendment**).

** Which, according to the most fervent "gun enthusiasts," also connects inseparably to the 1st Amendment, i.e., in that prancing around open-carry, dressed in Army-Navy surplus store cosplay coture is constitutional "free speech" emblematic of one's fealty to the shall-not-be-infringed 2nd.

 

The very purpose of a firearm is to launch metal projectiles at high speed in order to damage or destroy objects of users' focus—from paper targets to beer bottles or soup cans, to squirrels, rabbits, deer, birds, elephants, etc, to other humans.

And, yes, they can be used lawfully and "safely." C'mon.

Interesting legal times draw nigh in the digital space. That's for sure.

 

 

WHAT ABOUT OTHER ONLINE ADDICTIONS?

 

 

Casino Capitalism...

Polymarket? Online sports gambling?

UPDATE

 

 

Just added a 3rd Sean Carroll book to my stash. A Series of Fortunate Events. Awesome writer and thinker. 

…I have shown how we know that we are all here, both collectively and individually, through a series of accidents—cosmological, geological, and biological accidents. I have also shown how and why some of us will depart via accident. 

Our chance-driven world is a profound revelation. It is astonishing that blind chance is the source of all novelty, diversity, and beauty in the biosphere. I hope that you are wonderstruck at what an asteroid, sliding tectonic plates, and a fibrillating polymer of just four bases have wrought. 

But our chance-driven existence also poses the unsettling quandary that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but a world as novelist Christian Jungerson put it of “unmerciful randomness, immense chaos, and constant biological vulnerability.” This view, of course, shatters traditional beliefs about humanity’s place in the larger scheme. 

As Monod’s critics decried, chance puts God out of a job, or at least many of the jobs we have traditionally assigned to Him or Her. God is not in the conception business choosing the winning sperm and egg, nor the genetic engineering business designing creatures’ DNA and traits, nor the weather-making business, nor the cancer business, nor the pandemic business. 

One recourse in the face of such claims is simply to deny chance. But should we have the courage to accept the pervasive role of chance, some challenging questions arise about the meaning and purpose of our lives: If we are here by accident, not by Design, what are we supposed to do? How might we live in the face of this knowledge? 

My first impulse is to pull a Dr. McCoy (“Bones” from Star Trek) and plead, “Dammit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a philosopher.” I think that these questions are for each of us to decide for ourselves…

Carroll, Sean B.. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (pp. 164-165). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

BACK TO THE HEADLINE TOPIC

 

Two veteran tech journalists. One hour. No easy answers.
Jacob Ward (The Rip Current, NBC News, Al Jazeera) and Taylor Lorenz (User Mag, The New York Times, The Washington Post) go head-to-head on the biggest question in tech policy right now: Is the social media addiction crisis a genuine public health emergency — or is it a moral panic being weaponized by the same reactionary forces that came for rock and roll, comic books, and the telephone?

They agree on more than you'd expect. They disagree where it counts.

Topics covered:

• The 2012 collapse in adolescent mental health — correlation or causation?
• Jonathan Haidt's data and its critics
• Section 230, FOSTA-SESTA, and who really wins when tech gets "regulated"
• Why Meta is quietly funding the groups suing Meta
• Social casino games, behavioral harm, and the limits of US regulation
• What data privacy law could actually fix — and why we're not doing it
• The authoritarian endgame nobody's talking about

CODA

 

This came in the mail today. 80th birthday gift from my dear sister. I did not know til last weekend that she was a Scott Galloway fangirl. Cool.