I’m going to tell you something embarrassing. For a long time, I thought the internet would immediately make society better. How could it not? A world where everyone was more connected would be a world where everyone was more empathetic. Obviously. The gatekeepers would fall. There would be more access, more expertise, more chances for curiosity to be rewarded. 

This is not what has happened. 

There are good parts, of course. We really did get access to many lifetimes’ worth of high-quality information, but it turns out the information doesn’t matter that much. Once we had infinite content, what mattered more than anything was which bits were easiest to pay attention to. 

An entire professional class of content creators emerged whose job was to figure out how to make their little video more engaging, watchable, and unignorable than the next. We entered an attention arm’s race. And we did it with the help of recommendation algorithms designed to amplify even the tiniest difference in the ability of a piece of content to hold your attention. 

As a YouTuber, I too try to capture people’s attention. I make a lot of educational and pro-social content, but our systems are not designed to reward it. Our social media ecosystem can’t consistently measure how true something is. All the algorithms know is whether you click........

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