I believe that observing social behavior, which would be easy to do with a powerful social network, would provide important human cultural data that could be used to help develop that AI. Right now, the AI is being fed Google Search data. It’s seeing what sites people visit on mobile phones, which ads people click on in YouTube, what types of words or phrases people are translating, how people respond in emails and more. There are thousands of data-inputs that are feeding this ultimate AI. I believe that observing hundreds of millions of people interacting on a social network would have provided additional invaluable behavioral and cultural data to that construct.
Sergey’s a heck of a good guy, even if he did kill Google+! He even makes Google Glass look cool.
About eight years ago, Sergey Brin invited me to spend the day with him at Google X and present something to his team. I can’t really talk about what I presented because I signed a lot of forms, but that was the beginning of a nice and casual friendship. I also found out Sergey is quite the hobbyist photographer! I’m not his best friend or anything, but we have talked on many occasions at Google X, at conferences, at Google Zeitgeist, etc. I know he’s a very nice and kind gentleman. I totally trust him. And I believe that he would want a Google-made AI to be very helpful to humanity. Even though he probably played a role in shutting down Google+, maybe he (or someone else at Alphabet) has another social experiment up their sleeves.
In the meantime, I also have a few ideas of my own on how to build a better mousetrap.
Blank Piece of Paper
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Buckminster Fuller
I love designing things. I designed a game one time that looked like it was going to be a huge success, but it was mismanaged—partially by me—and it was a failure. I’ve designed a few other things since then which have worked out a little better. So, why not a social network?
Recently, I had the opportunity to do some thinking about what a good social network would look like. I spent some time with a handful of clever tech folks while we were on a multi-day hike in Spain, so I bounced a few ideas off of them. Our discussions there helped to solidify murky things in my mind, especially in terms of analyzing the current landscape of social media.
My roommate on the hike was Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. I’m biased to like this guy because I’ve been using WordPress for over 10 years. On this hike, Mullenweg wisely explained how new social networks changed the game and the reward system. He said, “The thing that made social networks so successful is also their downfall: cumulative counts of your success as measured by posts, followers, likes. Prior to social networks, we’d show you activity. Here’s how this post did, here’s how many visitors you had on this day. This would go up and down, often out of your control. So how do you always reward someone? Give them a target that always goes up: cumulative followers, page views, etc. People are bad at tracking second-order changes in growth, but cumulative measures can always boost self-worth if they always go up.”
I couldn’t agree more, and this helped fuel my initial concept.
If I were to design a social network, it would be based on the concept of Dunbar’s Number. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist who came up with the idea, explained it as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” Or, to put it more simply, the number of people you have meaningful relationships with. Dunbar theorized that the number of relationships one person can manage at a time is capped at 150.
Why would this number be 150? 150 was the average size of a village or tribe for 99% of our ancestors when we were hunter-gatherers and whatnot. Agriculture and urbanization, which only happened in the most recent 1% of our human history, allowed bigger towns, beyond the traditional 150 people, to develop. But our brains, according to Dunbar, haven’t evolved at the same rate as our technology. We are essentially still locked into that 150-person cap.
Go ahead, think about it. How many people can you keep track of? Family, friends, some old friends from high school you loosely keep tabs on, your doctor, your kid’s friend’s parents who are certainly not your friends, but you keep track of them, the guy that does your lawn, that kooky cashier at the drugstore, etc. Beyond those one and hundred and fifty people, the rest start to get a bit fuzzy and muddled.
When our ancestors lived in nomadic herds, they’d see the whole crew nightly around the campfire. The 150 connections of our ancestors were immediate family.
When urbanization began people began to be surrounded by thousands of strangers. It was more difficult to find solid footing within your community of 150. In fact, it was almost impossible, because everyone had a different group of 150. There was a ripping of the usual social cohesion.
The way we interact socially also dramatically changed in the 1950s when we combined urbanization with mass media. Specifically, when televisions started popping up in our living rooms, we became paradoxically less likely to spend time with groups of our 150. We’d be at home alone with our nuclear family. To fill the gap, we began to add people we saw on TV regularly to our 150 people, especially if our friends tracked those same people.
This is one of my working theories: Soap operas and celebrity rumor-magazines became popular after urbanization because our new living conditions made it highly improbable, if not impossible, to get to know and form a bond of tribal trust with 150 local people. Think about the great personalities many of us have come to know over the past 60 years through our television. We had people like Walter Cronkite, Lucille Ball, Benny Hill, Johnny Carson, Captain Stubing, Jerry Seinfeld, and well, the list goes on and on. I am only speaking from a Western perspective, but I know that these personalities have their counterparts in the East. Magazines like People and The National Enquirer were routinely stocked at the grocery store to help you keep track of these relationships because these people were included in so many people’s 150.
I swear, in the 90s, my mom not only knew what every actor in Dallas and General Hospital were doing on their shows, she knew what they were doing off-screen as well. Then, when her friends got together in real life, they would talk about their common 150, many of which were fictionalized characters on TV. It still happens. Even when I get together with my friends and the Scotch whisky comes out, we’ll talk about how Jon Snow is kind of a whiny, confused-looking guy, but the ladies seem to totally love him.
Even though technology has advanced our human brains have not. Our brains are still stuck at that 150-person ideal tribal zone, where you know your family, your friends, all your friend’s family members, the village elders, the shamans, the hunters, etc.
We have these slow brains—wetware, as opposed to software—that still have strange hang-ups about the way life used to be. For instance, we still search for our tribes even when we may not have a real affiliation with a tribe. This is why people get so excited about the Dallas Cowboys playing the Philadelphia Eagles. We may not fight in city-state wars anymore, but these are wars by proxy now, where we send a group of warriors to have a pretend battle. If you know anything about professional sports, you’ll have seen how many men treat it as seriously as actual war.
Our wetware has evolved, in some ways, to manage our new existence. Steven Pinker, author and psychologist, has written about a few of these evolutions. In particular, he describes how the average human used to be much more homicidal and prone to violence. Over time, most of that aggression has been worked out of our system and most of us can channel it to do some amazing things rather than kill people.80
However, we’re not even close to turning the dial much beyond our 150 relationships. Our neocortex is just too small to remember any more than that.
So, how would this idea lead to the design of a social network?
Here are my design specs.
● You can follow up to 150 “things,” which would include:
○ People: Relatives, friends, crushes, Jeff Goldblum, Flavor Flav, PewDiePie
○ Groups or curators: The BBC, Arsenal, Burning Man, or Global Wildlife Conservation
● The follow is one-way, so it doesn’t have to be mutual. You could stalk celebrities if you wanted, then with your friends and relatives, the follow would be mutual.
● You share with who you want to share with. We’d re-use that great idea of Google Circles where you put the people you follow into groups of your choosing and share content just to those groups. Examples groups might include family, friends, celebrities, sports, yoga class, or book club. People can be in multiple circles. When you post, you choose which Circles you post to.
● Stats are private. The number of likes or comments you get would not be publicly shared and would remain just for you to see.
Just that simple.
One reason I like using Dunbar’s number as a limiting factor is because you can actually keep track of 150 people. These 150 are people and groups you really care about. When you run out of slots, it forces you to review those 150 things and pick out the ones that you no longer want to follow.
This solution also works because it’s asymmetrical. Even though you can only follow 150 people, groups, or topics, you could still be followed by thousands or millions of others.
In terms of monetization, which is important for every startup, the first two years would be free. After that, every user pays $1 a month. No ads.
Anyway, will someone please build this so we can give it a whirl?
How the 150 Solution Solves All the Problems
Here’s just a few ways that this approach fixes some of the problems we’ve talked about:
Bots mostly go away. Because users have to pay $1 per month, the barrier to entry for bots is much higher.
The Newsfeed can be optimized for the right things. The goal of the 150 is not to keep you on as long as possible to show you ads because there are no ads at all. When the social network is not trying to optimize performance to show you as many ads as possible, it can focus on other more positive activities.
Wall Street is happy. The path to revenue is clear and tied to the number of users.
Your data is safer. The 150 doesn’t need to sell your data to make money because you already pay $1 to use the service.
Your anxiety level is lower. You would never feel overloaded with too much content because you can only follow 150 things. This limit keeps everything manageable in your head, rather than the generally scattered feeling you probably have now when parsing your newsfeed.
Your friends/followers see your content. There is a high likelihood that most of your content will be seen by people that follow you. Currently, on Facebook and Instagram, less than 2% of the posts you share are seen by people who follow you. That’s because they follow too many people. These services also have a financial incentive to not overshare your posts, so that you will pay these services more money to promote your posts.
There’s no public scoreboard. The network would not have a public scoreboard that shows followers, plays, likes, or views. Each individual user would be able to see their own stats, but they are not on public display. This immediately removes one of the big determinants of anxiety. Also, comments are likely to be much nicer because people have openly chosen to follow this one person in their previous 150 slots.
Not bad, eh?
I’d also like to implement a recommendation engine organized around sharing positive content. Rather than encouraging outrage, this social network can be a force for positive change in the world: a betterment of the entire human condition on a massive scale. The social network could feature a recommendation engine that encourages the best of human behavior while minimizing the worst of it and then focus on showing you good ideas and good suggestions.
Is Time Up?
I hate to be fatalistic but Instagram and many other social networks, including Facebook, may be beyond saving. Even though in many ways there are good and positive things happening on them, they are also fostering and amplifying the worst aspects of human nature. I don’t think that can be controlled from the top or by the software itself.
There are indeed better ideas for social networks out there. But with more than 1 billion active Instagram users, there’s incredible inertia, and we face something called a coordination problem. To summarize—how do we know if our friends will use a new social network?
Here’s an example of a coordination problem. Let’s say that you and I exist in a time before cell phones and we are interested in meeting for dinner. However, neither of us is sure in which part of the town the other will be. If there’s only one restaurant in town it isn’t a problem, we both go there. However, the problem would not be so easy if there were several restaurants, whereby my interests are better served by one choice (e.g. a restaurant near me) and yours by a different choice (one near you).
Relating this back to social media, if a better network were to come along it would be easy to get your friend to join you on it because you would just ask them to sign up. However, that’s not a scalable solution, you can’t do that with everyone you know, so it would be impossible to get most people to move to the new social network.
Facebook has so many users that the problem becomes almost unmanageable. It’s a sticky platform, with many users who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, which exacerbates the problem. How long did it take you to teach your mom how to use Facebook? If she’s still on Facebook, she won’t be budging. It’s just not going to happen.
There is a similar issue with YouTube. If you are a video creator, you want to post your video where most people will see it. If you’re a video watcher, you want to go where there’s the largest amount of free content. This is why YouTube dominates the vast majority of the market. They reached critical mass first. Even if something better comes along, you have to convince most of the creators and viewers to move over to the new platform. It’s not an easy task.
So, even though I like my idea of the 150, I’m also realistic. It would be hard to get folks to move over.
Therefore, we’re back to where we started—figuring out how the existing social networks can change from within. Remember, these are not static entities. They are based on software and algorithms that can be changed if priorities are re-aligned.
Tristan Harris, the former Google Project Manager and design ethicist, imagines one possible future. What if all those smart engineers at social media companies were to stop focusing on capturing people’s attention and instead focused on trying to encourage more meaningful real-life experiences? What if social networks could help change people’s minds, make them more open-minded, and facilitate healthy relationships? It’s absolutely possible but the current system tries to maximize getting your attention so that they can advertise to you, since this is how these organizations make money. There is an excellent podcast with Sam Harris and Tristan Harris that explores these ideas in depth.81 By the way, I personally recommend listening to as many Sam Harris podcasts as possible. It’s a great way to keep your mind zen in today’s crazy technology world.
Chapter 8
How to Stay Zen on Social Media
“Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different.”
— Paulo Coelho
We compare ourselves and our status to individuals in the media we consume. We subtly change the inner stories we tell ourselves. We might see ourselves as less— less pretty, less rich, or less glamorous—than the famous and popular individuals we see on social media. We might compare ourselves to them and find ourselves lacking.
Social media is an echo chamber of the ego and many of us step into it numerous times a day. Most everything the “world” —aka the media we consume—tells us matters, does not actually matter at all. Having more money, followers, or comments is no
t the recipe for a better life. Many people are increasingly anxious due to dealing with nonsense on social media.
So how do we fix it? How do we stop feeling anxious, frustrated, or “less-than” these beautiful people we see online? That’s what this chapter is about.
All that really matters is gathering a loving group of people around you who are supportive and fun. The next level, if you can find it, is to foster a broader network who encourage and support your creativity or ambition.
When you break down the best essences of humanity, you’ll see we are here to love one another, create, share, and cooperate, and to encourage everyone else to do the same. Anything beyond that is a distraction.
There is a doorway out. It’s like one of those last-chance exits for the scary rides at Disneyland that you can slip out of in case you change your mind after waiting in line for an hour. I’ll show you how to find that exit.
The most important thing to realize is that it’s okay to “let go” of yourself and understand that it is wonderful to say, “Hey, I’m a work in progress.” Do not over-inflate some of the ideas you have about yourself. Your ego is always trying to find a definition of you, what you’re about, what you enjoy, what people think of you. These narratives are simply stories in your head. Clinging to these stories, if they aren’t the right ones, can hold you back. Do not hang on to any rigid idea of yourself. Richard Dawkins referred to us as humans not as a solid structure with rigid selves. We’re more like a sand dune, re-forming itself across a desert of time.82
Now that we’ve seen some of the ways users can be manipulated online, let’s think about how we can interface successfully with these social networks going forward. I think a good way to talk about this is to figure you out a little on the inside.
Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram Page 19
