Sam Liebeskind

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.

This sounds spectacularly self-centered: that you can only quit a thing, or modify your usage of it, when it fails to serve you. But if we think of our phones and social media as addictive products, which they certainly are, then the classic addiction model makes sense: you only consider quitting when the negative impacts (the dead feeling of the... See more

This shift in perspective clarifies that humans have always used technology to increase our ability to control our environment. There are few biological or physiological differences between ancestral and modern humans; instead, the relevant differences are improved knowledge and understanding, tools, technology and, indeed, AI. In a sense, modern... See more

To have an impact on the world, a system needs to be deployed and funded. Open sourcing the sewage system won’t flush the toilet. Open sourcing a search engine doesn't create a search competitor.

But long before the internet, philosophers and religious leaders theorized a global connectivity, or collective consciousness. In 1922, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “Noosphere”, or the “thinking layer” of the earth, networking all human thought. In the internet era, his predictions have become surprisingly accurate, now starting to... See more