Arena stage requests not the ree toughest graduate say today. We will try to keep it lively print thank you so much for being here. You repeat visitor to the atlantic festival we appreciate that. If you do it six more times you get a free latte, you get a punch card. Youve got to get to the punch card. We are going to talk about some very serious things i want to start the very serious and sad thing, the news this morning your friend and colleague senator feinstein has passed. You are very close with her. I am sure everyone to be interested in hearing a little of your recollection of working with her being friends with her. Next i was yes a friend but also a great admirer of dianne feinstein. She was extraordinary Public Servant and a political leader. First in california, first in california and obviously in our country. I saw her as somebody who was a true trailblazer. Because of her devotion to finding solutions to problems. This sounds like oldfashioned politics which i still adhere too. She was always looking where the Common Ground could be found and inhabited. She was absently fearless but also very open. She is a primary sponsor of the assault weapons ban back in 94. Because the big traumatic experience of the San Francisco city council. I will never forget the speech she gave an favor of the assault weapons ban when she talked about what it is like we see grievously and fatally shot. She was trying the best she could literally fingers the bullet holes up the bleeding. She was brave it. She was honorable. She was honest. She was willing to hold anyone to account. One of the amazing results of her leadership is when she chaired the intelligence committee. She was determined to do a study of what happened during the iraq war. During the war on terrorism. Waterboarding and other kinds of abuses. Whether that meant directly or indirectly ordered or had a blind eye turned toward them. She thought everybody about that. She thought fellow senators, the obama administration, she thought everybody. She came out huge thousands of pages report later turn into a movie starring adam driver. She believes so strongly you have to face the truth about assault weapons or behavior that we were not proud of it. She was a great colleague of mine print out tight one final story. After the oh eight primary then senator obama called and asked if i would meet with him but could we go somewhere that would not draw a lot of attention . Thats going to be hard. We thought and i called diane. I said can barack and i meet at your house . She said sure, of course you can. I had total trust in her. I literally got down in the backseat of my car leaving the house when no one would know i was coming obama put a press lid on as you might revealed his press he wasnt going anywhere and then we spent a couple of hours in her living room talk about the campaign, about what i would do to support him. What he saw as the challenges the general election. The kind of conversation that led to our working closely together. Him asking me too be secretary of state diana left us alone but every so often popping in and asking if we wanted more chardonnay. [laughter] i will miss her a lot. She was a very special person. Cruxes chardonnay summit that led you to be secretary of state questioner quick chardonnay summit led to pretty big job. Thank you for sharing that. Youve written about for the atlantic and the interesting thing about the subject it has become a little bit of a truism politics is downstream from culture. But we are learning more and more as culture is downstream from a psychological destruction and theology and other things. He wrote this piece for us recently. Was the name of the session. In it you are trying to explore what are the deeper causes of the polarization that we see. And sort of the general unhappiness that is not always supported by a set of facts. And i was wondering maybe you could walk goes through a little bit how you started thinking about loneliness, atomization, technology, all of these things. How they lead to the dysfunction we are all experiencing . Accent is a wonderful sets of questions. And it really for me i started thinking about this many years ago. There has been a lot of commentary about what is happening to americans. Whats happening to our society long before trump showed up even before the internet and social media. People were feeling dissatisfied. Unsettled by the pace of change. Little did we know how much faster it would move it. I wrote a book back in the 90s because it takes a village brickwork that was you . Yes that was me progress i did not get briefed. [laughter] bucks i will send you a briefing next time but i am coming back for the latte. [laughter] so i wrote that book in part because of what i saw politically primarily. But also culturally. People were having challenges. Figuring out how do we raise our children . How do we form families question how do we combine work and family a particular issue for women like me. And so when i wrote that book there was a lot of talk lets call it meaning in life, purpose in life, usefulness in life. I do something i spent a lot of time pondering. There wasnt any easy answer to it. Then i began reading people like Robert Putnam and others talking about the values they were calling social capitol in healthy societies that really focus on quality of life issues. How they organize in living. So fastforward we began to see the disruption. Which initially was thrilling the technological disruption the rise of social media was so exciting to be in connection with people anywhere in the world. With a flick of a phone you have the Computing Power of eight a mainframe computer 20 years before. There is so much that was very thrilling about the world we could inhabit. The best commentary was how it was going to bring us together across lines, bridget division. That was some think we saw and were focused on. But then there was the dark underbelly how technology is being manipulated and used. When barack obama ran for president in 2008 he pioneered using technology to bring people together on behalf of his campaign. It was very successful and held up as a model. By 2016 when iran the underbelly of the internet we had already seen the kind of uprising misogynistic racist uprising against women or outsiders of any kind. Talking about the way people who gamed all the time or behaving. How that unfortunately spilled into socalled real world. We were beginning to see some indicators. Running through this with psychological operations which form the basis for technical developments in propaganda and active measures. Not just by the russians, Cambridge Analytic, others. So we were watching in real time the changing of the impact of technology and ways i certain had not foreseen, did not understand. We began to get evidence from scientists. Medical doctors were tickly pediatricians but psychologists and psychiatrists and others very clear impact from screen tiebreak not just screen time, what people were doing on those screens. The American Academy of pediatrics came out some years ago that got very little attention. Came out and said based on what we are sent no child under two should have access to screen. They have since revised that to a higher and higher age. We are learning how screens, how technology, have the addiction to technology literally changes the way your brain develops. There was a beginning of a commentary sounding the alarm about all of this. Then we began to get evidence about increases in anxiety, depression, eating disorders particularly among young women. But also young men as well. And then covid hit. Covid was a mass exercise and loneliness. On dislocation. Then we come out of covid but a long trail of consequences that we are frankly in my view still working through. I then the Surgeon General put out a very thoughtful report talking about how loneliness is both a physical and Mental Health risk. We now have evidence that loneliness exacerbates conditions of poor health. Often precipitates those conditions. Outcomes are worse. We are seeing evidence of how being involved in the outer world, having friendship networks. Being involved in volunteer activities, associations, sports teams whatever brings you together with other people its actually a net positive for your help. The evidence is pushing us toward recognizing something kind of oldfashioned. We need to figure how to bring people back into personal contact at the very time on thee addiction to social media on the screens is driving people more and more down rabbit holes and often alone. I talked to the Surgeon General after reports came out he said he was particular concern about young women. I said so what is the difference between young women and young men . He said we dont know for sure about our speculation, our hypothesis is that young men spend a lot of time in front of screens, are more likely than not doing something. Like playing a game. Learning how to code it. Coming up with some kind of activity often with other people especially pure gaming. Whereas young women are often alone, scrolling, seeing things that make them feel bad about themselves. Find out theyre being left out. Being pressured to engage in activities like sending pictures of themselves that are really fraught with all kinds of dangers that was a really interesting insight. If you could actually form a Real Community online maybe you can avoid some of these consequences. But too often people are not doing that. They are now very insular lonely place. In the article we talked about how steve abandon his in the gaming industry. Texas is where i wanted to go to, surprisingly i wanted to go to steve bannon. [laughter] better you than me. [laughter] excited not make you write it. Like i did put that in the article. Bannon wasnt gaming original apricots he had an insight. Roxy had an insight but is actually in the industry for a while. And his insight was all of these young men were seeking something. They were engaged. They were incredibly devoted to their gaming. They could be weaponize. They could be used because often times their emotions were so wrong. Yelling and screaming at their screen. Yelling and screaming with the guys they are with it. Instead of being on a Playing Field doing that, they are in whatever room they are in and can be reached individually. Not just collectively. He had the insight that you could take that energy and some of that negative reaction that gaming produce and a weaponize it for political purposes. Next rollback for one minute to the founding techno optimists of social media. So Mark Zuckerberg for instance had a belief. Im going to credit him with this being a sincere belief that instant Global Connectivity to everyone else in the world was a good thing rather than a bad thing. My question to you is was that just a marketing ultimately . Did they genuinely believe this would be a good thing . And b, is there a good internet that you can imagine . Is there a good social media ecosystem or does it always devolve into a lowest common denominator nastiness . I will give the benefit of the doubt to the early founders the techno optimists. I do think they believe that. They had to figure how to pay for what they wanted to do. If you could have a Free Internet with no pressure to maximize negativity and drive more interactions. People are more likely to remember it if it was negative. And then you can place ads against it. If there had been a couple of things. Maybe when the Communications Act of the 1990s was passed, the idea was very optimistic. There would be an open internet that would be available to people. It could provide these connections. And so it was viewed as a passthrough. It was viewed as not having any responsibility for gatekeeping like you do at the atlantic. You a fact check, effect check people i know that because ive written pieces for you. You have standards that you try to apply. But the idea originally behind the internet and the development of social media platform was they were pastors so they should not be held responsible. Things would flow through. As an economic decision. Roxy was partly an economic process also are the techno optimists perspective. They are not a publisher. They are more like eight utility. People push their electrons down we dont know exactly with the electrons are going to end up with at the Nuclear Power plant or turn on your toaster. We are going to allow them to the lack of accountability. No accountability. But they control the algorithm. They control everything. The algorithms accentuate the negative. I dont think certainly most people probably detect leaders themselves understood that. But i dont think policymakers, the public, the press i dont think most people understood that and that late 90s the algorithm with an effect be determining what you watched. And therefore what ads you would be subjected to. Once it turned into an ad driven rather than subscription it could have been subscription but that was not the choice made. And we are at the brink of mort manipulation and Artificial Intelligence. This doubling down for they come to washington and say please, please stop us from doing anything bad. [laughter] governess, put guardrails up they go back to urging their engineers to come up with even more ways to get more people to spend more time through their algorithms on the site. I think the loneliness piece of this is that rather than the dream of interconnectivity it has cause disruption, divisiveness and even destruction because of the manipulation. Not only by the Tech Companies themselves. Increasingly the Nobel Peace Prize where the great journalist from the philippines is visiting us at columbia where i am now teaching Foreign Policy decisionmaking course. She was one of the first people who understood how leaders were beginning to manipulate the algorithms. If you pour enough content into a site the algorithms pick it up for they see people looking at it lets get more of it, how much faster, got it . If you are in the military and you want to drive the people out, began using social media. If you are in the philippines where 97 of people in the philippines use facebook. That was their major new source but also their major ability to connect. Then you get a dictator and others who use that. This is now a serious threat to international relations. To national stability. To the kind of impact on individuals were going to talk about earlier. We seem incapable of coming together. Lay on the tech business. Especially in that side of the coin populism, nastiness, misinformation existed before facebook and the internet. I was of the populace before american history. There is a counter argument that says tropism could not possibly exist without the algorithmic of these companies. How do you fall on this question of the role of technology . The technology and the rise of populism and tropism . You are right. Its existed for a very long time. But never with the amplification and the acceleration of misinformation and disinformation we have today this is so much more sophisticated by a factor of so high i cant imagine. I dont think we can come to say it change human nature. But attack went right to. Play to the part of human nature that is most subject to fear, anger, and hate. Because it was good business. A lot of these guys dont have a political agenda or if they have a political agenda they say oh yes we want more people to have better lives. We have optimistic leftleaning analysis but their activities are driving more and more people into acting on their fears. Acting on disinformation then was ever possible before. Wando led to a genocidal massacre because of radio. The wart setting serbs and croats against muslims was fed by the radio. Look at the damage it did. But now, we can set people against one another so much more easily and with very little accountability. That is very much the challenge we face in trying to figure out if we can put at least part of the genie back in the bottle but the only group of the world that is done that is the European Union with their attempt to regulate technology. European Union Countries have culturally have a different understanding of censorship and free speech than we do. So the question is when does putting the genie back in the bottle crossover light into censorship . There has never been protection for certain forms of speech, you know that youve been a journalist for so long. I remember some of the cases. It is a false charge that trying to regulate both damaging speech is a violation of free speech. Remember the companies themselves can do whatever they want to do to regulate speech. You could have a site which says i for one and never going to let the algorithm kick out the name troll. Its never going to appear that is a business decision thats their right to do that not that they would. They make decisions about pornography theyre getting further and further behind emperor trying to prevent children from accessing that but they try. But when you have got bad actors say in the government cannot try to correct false information about things like vaccines, because that would violate free speech. That is a total misunderstanding of the whole canada free speech law. So do you have to be careful question rick of course you have to be careful but that doesnt mean it cant be done. One of the arguments ive made for quite some time is the section and the 1990s law called section 2 30 which grants Technology Companies freedom from liability no matter what shows up. They have certain obligations about what appears on their site. [applause] we are in a situation now for those consequential. But this might be the most consequential in history. It might be the last if youre not careful. And you know because you studied your thinking, steve abandon has an idea thats related to what youre talking about. Flood zone. Is right for. Is directly learned from authoritarians if you provide so much false information put into the ecosystem no one will ever know its real i would say ai can generate even more now. The question for you is how do you relate all of this to the coming electoral challenge . It is nothing surprising anymore but it is still somewhat shockingspeaking plainly about this and i think we have to speak plainly about this. This is not a partisan observation this is a reality observation he is a racist and misogynists facing 91 felony counts of multip