Sam Liebeskind

I was distracted by a sudden recollection of all the instances I had heard the attributes of countries being used to describe the accomplishments of internet companies: the number of users of a streaming service being equated to the populations of sovereign nation-states, a company’s online-advertising revenue to the GDPs of several countries, all ... See more

I am more inclined to the argument that artificial intelligence is, rather than an imaginative agent, part of a lineage of cultural technologies that have allowed us to encode and access the intelligence of other humans across generations, just as internet search and libraries and print and the writing system have, just as language itself has.

Some users may not want to see any potentially abusive content at all, while others may, for example, need to sift through banal personal attacks in order to track credible death threats. The point, however, is that users themselves should be able to exercise significantly more agency over their own social media experience.

Brown and Jaźwińska posit that there are some counterforces in the publisher toolkit, including owned-and-operated platforms and cultivating more direct relationships with audiences.

We’re the providers of information and we want to be the distributors. But Google now wants to be the distributor.