Ethan Zuckerman

Because I think there are strategies where even if you, even if you didn't want to necessarily do it the way I would suggest doing it, which is, like, let's go in there and add the friction, like add the intentionality around sharing, that kind of thing, um, you know, even if you did wanna keep a content moderation strategy, you know, beginning to work on decentralized content moderation.

Like, imagine if an s- like, s- um, there's a, a scholar named, uh, Ethan Zuckerman at UMass Amherst, Amherst who talks about the idea that right now we are subjects of a king on our social platforms, you know.

We can follow the laws, we can not follow the laws, we can go to another place, but we're, we're not citizens.

You know, in, in a democracy, you know, it's not just that we have rights.

Or even it's very hard to access ideas outside of what you have expressed affinity towards.

Like I think, uh, one of my favorite ways of conceptualizing this, um, is from Ethan Zuckerman, who had a book, Digital Cosmopolitanism, from like 2017 I think at this point.

But in it he describes the be- at that time it was like the algorithmic shunting that we are all subject to basically puts you th- in these affinity groups that it was very hard to break out of.

And so instead of the energy being, "Oh, I want to like stay within my group and like not see what other people are seeing," the energy has to become, "Oh, I want to make myself uncomfortable and go find other ideas." Which-

And yet most people are still trying to play the volume-based mediocre game.

And just to illuminate this even further, there was a guy named Ethan Zuckerman who ran a study back in 2023, and his team built a program that collected 10,000 random YouTube videos across the platform.

And here's what he found.

About 4% of those videos accounted for about 94% of all the views.

Like, that's the whole point, right? The issue is there's this media that's trying to flatten us into something so one-dimensional that it should not represent you.

And so I remember when I was still on the, like, I want to live under a rock phase, I had a really important conversation with one of my advisors at the time, Ethan Zuckerman of MIT Media Lab, And he's, well, it wasn't a conversation.

To be more frank, I walked into his office to talk about something.

He goes, you just went viral.