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I was talking to a guy
at a party in California

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about tech platforms

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and the problems
they're creating in society.

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And he said, "Man, if the CEOs
just did more drugs

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and went to Burning Man,

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we wouldn't be in this mess."

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(Laughter)

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I said, "I'm not sure I agree with you."

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For one thing, you know,

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most of the CEOs have already
been to Burning Man.

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But also, I'm just not sure
that watching a bunch of half-naked people

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run around and burn things

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is really the inspiration
they need right now.

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(Laughter)

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But I do agree that things are a mess.

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And so, we're going to come
back to this guy,

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but let's talk about the mess.

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Our climate's getting hotter and hotter,

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It's getting harder and harder
to tell truth from fiction,

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and we've got this global
migratory crisis.

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And just at the moment
when we really need new tools

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and new ways of coming
together as a society,

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it feels like social media
is kind of tearing at our civic fabric

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and setting us against each other.

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We've got viral
misinformation on WhatsApp,

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bullying on Instagram,

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and Russian hackers on Facebook.

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And I think this conversation
that we're having right now

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about the harms that
these platforms are creating,

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is so important.

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But I also worry

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that we could be letting a kind of good
existential crisis in Silicon Valley

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go to waste

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if the bar for success is just
that it's a little harder

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for Macedonian teenagers
to publish false news.

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The big question, I think, is not just

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what do we want platforms to stop doing,

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but now that they've effectively
taken control of our online public square,

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what do we need from them
for the greater good?

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To me, this is one of the most
important questions of our time.

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What obligations
do tech platforms have to us

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in exchange for the power
that we let them hold

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over our discourse?

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And I think this question is so important,

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because even if today’s platforms go away,

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we need to answer this question

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in order to be able to ensure
that the new platforms that come back

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are any better.

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So, for the last year,
I've been working with Dr. Talia Stroud

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at the University of Texas, Austin,

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and we've talked to sociologists,
and political scientists,

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and philosophers,

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to try to answer this question.

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And at first we asked, you know,

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if you were Twitter or Facebook
and trying to rank content for democracy,

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rather than for ad clicks or engagement,

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what might that look like?

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But then we realized, you know,

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this sort of suggests that
this is an information problem

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or a content problem.

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And for us, the platform crisis
is a people problem.

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It's a problem about the emergent
weird things that happen

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when large groups of people get together.

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And so we turned to another older idea.

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We asked, what happens
when we think about platforms as spaces?

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We know from social psychology
that spaces shape behavior.

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You put the same group of people
in a room like this,

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and they're going to behave
really differently

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than in a room like this.

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When researcher put
softer furniture in classrooms,

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participation rates rose by 42 percent.

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And spaces even have
political consequences.

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When researchers looked at
neighborhoods with parks,

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versus neighborhoods without,

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after adjusting for socioeconomic factors,

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they found that neighborhoods with parks
had higher levels of social trust,

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and were better able to advocate
for themselves politically.

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So, spaces shape behavior

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partly by the way they're designed,

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and partly by the way that they encode
certain norms about how to behave.

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You know, we all know that
there are some behaviors

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that are OK in a bar,
that are not OK in a library,

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and maybe vice versa.

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And this gives us a little bit of a clue,

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because there are online spaces

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that encode these same kinds
of behavioral norms.

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So, for example, behavior on LinkedIn

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seems pretty good.

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Why?

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Because it reads as a workplace.

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And so people follow workplace norms.

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You can even see it in the way
they dress in their profile pictures.

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(Laughter)

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So, if LinkedIn is a workplace,
what is Twitter like?

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(Laughter)

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Well, it's like a vast, cavernous expanse

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where there are people
talking about sports

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arguing about politics,
yelling at each other, flirting,

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trying to get a job,

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all in the same place
with no walls, no divisions,

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and the owner gets paid more
the louder the noise is.

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No wonder it's a mess.

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And this raises another thing
that become obvious

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when we think about platforms
in terms of physical space.

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Good physical spaces
are almost always structured.

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They have rules.

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Silicon Valley is built on this idea

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that unstructured space
is conducive for human behavior.

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And I actually think
there's a reason for this myopia

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built into the location
of Silicon Valley itself.

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So, Michele Gelfand is a sociologist

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who studies how norms
vary across cultures,

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and she watches how cultures like Japan,

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which she calls tight,

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is very conformist, very rule-following.

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And cultures like Brazil are very loose.

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And you can see this even in things like

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how closely synchronized
the clocks are on a city street.

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So, as you can see,

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the United States
is one of the looser countries.

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And the loosest state
in the United States is,

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you got it, California.

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And Silicon Valley culture came out
of the 1970s Californian counterculture.

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So, just to recap,

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the spaces that the world is living in

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came out of the loosest culture
in the loosest state

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in one of the loosest
countries in the world.

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No wonder they undervalue structure.

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And I think this really matters,
because people need structure.

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You may have heard this word anomie.

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It literally means
a lack of norms in French,

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and it was coined by Émile Durkheim
to describe the vast,

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overwhelming feeling that people have
in spaces without norms.

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Anomie has political consequences.

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Because, what Gelfand has found

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is that, when things are too loose,
people crave order and structure.

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And that craving for order and structure

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correlates really strongly
with support for people like these guys.

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I don't think it's crazy to ask

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if the structurlessness of online life

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is actually feeding anxiety

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that's increasing a responsiveness
to authoritarianism.

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So, how might platforms
bring people together

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in a way that creates meaning

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and helps people understand each other?

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And this brings me back
to our friend from Burning Man.

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Because, listening to him, I realized,

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it's not just that
Burning Man isn't the solution,

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it's actually a perfect metaphor
for the problem.

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(Laughter)

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You know, it's a great place
to visit for a week,

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this amazing art city,
rising out of nowhere in the dust.

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But you wouldn't want to live there.

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There's no running water,

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there's no trash pick-up,

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at some point, the hallucinogens run out,

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and you're stuck with a bunch
of wealthy white guys

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in the dust in the desert.

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(Laughter)

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Which to me is sometimes
how social media feels in 2019.

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(Laughter)

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A great, fun, hallucinatory place to visit

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has become our home.

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And so,

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if we look at platforms
through the lens of spaces,

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we can then ask ourselves,

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who knows how to structure spaces
for the public good?

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And it turns out that this is a question

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people have been thinking about
for a long time about cities.

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Cities were the original platforms.

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Two-sided marketplace?

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Check.

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Place to keep up with old friends
and distant relatives?

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Check.

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Vector for viral sharing?

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Check.

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In fact, you know,

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cities have encountered a lot of the same
social and political challenges

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that platforms are now encountering.

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They've dealt with massive growth

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that overwhelmed existing communities.

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And the rise of new business models.

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They've even had new
frictionless technologies

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that promised to connect
everyone together.

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And that, instead, deepened
existing social and race divides.

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But because of this history
of decay and renewal

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and segregation and integration,

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cities are the source
of some of our best ideas

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about how to build functional,
thriving communities.

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Faced with a top-down,
car-driven vision of city life,

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pioneers like Jane Jacobs

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said, let’s instead put
human relationships

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at the center of urban design.

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Jacobs and her fellow travelers,
like Holly Whyte, her editor,

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were these really great observers
of what actually happened on the street,

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they watched, you know,
where did people stop and talk.

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When did neighbors become friends?

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And they learned a lot.

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For example, they noticed

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that successful public places

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generally have three different ways
that they structure behavior.

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So, there's the built environment.

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You know, that we're going to put
a fountain here or a playground there.

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But then, there's programing,

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like, let's put a band at seven
and get the kids out.

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And there's this idea of mayors,

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people who kind of take this
informal ownership of a space

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to keep it welcoming and clean.

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All three of these things
actually have analogues online.

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But platforms mostly focus on code,

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on what's physically
possible in the space.

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And they focus much less on these
other two, softer, social areas.

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What are people doing there?

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Who's taking responsibility for it?

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So, like Jane Jacobs did for cities,

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Talia and I think we need
a new design movement

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for online space.

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One that considers not just, you know,

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how do we build products
that work for users or consumers,

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how do we make something user-friendly.

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But how do we make products
that are public-friendly?

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Because we need products
that don't serve individuals

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at the expense of the social fabric
on which we all depend.

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And we need it urgently,

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because political scientists tell us

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that healthy democracies
need healthy public spaces.

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So, the public-friendly
digital design movement

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that Talia and I imagine,

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asks this question,

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what would this interaction be like
if it was happening in physical space?

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And it asks the reverse question,

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what can we learn
from good physical spaces

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about how to structure behavior
in the online world?

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For example, I grew up
in a small town in Maine,

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and I went to a lot of those
town hall meetings that you hear about.

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And unlike the storybook version,
they weren't always nice.

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Like, people had big conflicts,

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big feelings,

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it was hard sometimes.

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But because of the way
that that space was structured,

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we managed to land it OK.

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How?

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Well, here's one important piece.

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The downcast glance, the dirty look,

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the raised eyebrow, the cough.

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When people went on too long,

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or lost the crowd,

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they didn't get banned or blocked
or hauled out by the police,

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they just got this soft,
negative social feedback.

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And that was actually very powerful.

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I think Facebook and Twitter
could build this,

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something like this.

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(Laughter)

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So, I think there are some other things

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that online spaces
can learn from offline spaces.

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Holly Whyte observed that
in healthy public spaces,

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there are often many different places
that afford different ways of relating.

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So the picnic table,
where you have lunch with your family,

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may not be suited for the romantic
walk with a partner

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or the talk with some business colleagues.

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And it's worth noting that in real space,

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in none of these places are there big,

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visible public signs of engagement.

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So digital designers could think about

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what kind of conversations
do we actually want to invite,

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and how do we build specifically
for those kinds of conversations?

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Remember the park that we talked about,

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that built social trust?

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That didn't happen because people
were having these big political arguments.

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Most strangers don't actually
even talk to each other

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the first three or four
or five times they see each other.

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But when people,

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even very different people,
see each other a lot,

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they develop familiarity,

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and that creates
bedrock for relationships.

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And I think actually, you know,

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maybe that early idea of cyberspaces

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kind of this bodiless meeting place
of pure minds and pure ideas,

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sent us off in the wrong direction.

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Maybe what we need instead
is to find a way to be in proximity,

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you know, mostly talking
amongst ourselves,

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but all sharing the same warm sun.

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And finally, healthy public spaces
create a sense of ownership and equity.

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And this is where the city metaphor
becomes challenging.

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Because, if Twitter is a city,

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it's a city that's owned
by just a few people

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and optimized for financial return.

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I think we really need
digital environments

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that we all actually have
some real ownership of.

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Environments that respect
the diversity of human existence,

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and that give us some say
and some input into the process.

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And I think we need this urgently.

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Because Facebook right now,

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I sort of think of like 1970s New York.

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(Laughter)

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The public spaces are decaying,
there's trash in the streets,

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people are kind of like
mentally and emotionally

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warming themselves over burning garbage.

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(Laughter)

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And --

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(Applause)

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And the natural response to this
is to haul up in your apartment

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or consider fleeing for the suburbs.

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It doesn't surprise me

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that people are giving up
on the idea of online public spaces,

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they way that they've given up
on cities over their history.

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And sometimes, I'll be honest,

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it feels to me like this whole project
of like wiring up a civilization

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and getting billions of people
to come into contact with each other

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is just impossible.

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But modern cities tell us
that it is possible

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00:15:13,258 --> 00:15:15,504
for millions of people
who are really different,

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sometimes living
right on top of each other,

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not just to not kill each other,

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but to actually build things together,

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find new experiences,

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create beautiful,
important infrastructure.

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And we cannot give up on that promise.

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If we want to solve the big,
important problems in front of us,

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we need better online public spaces.

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We need digital urban planners.

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New Jane Jacbses,

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who are going to build the parks
and park benches of the online world.

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And we need digital,
public-friendly architects,

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who are going to build
what Eric Klinenberg calls

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"palaces for the people,"
libraries and museums,

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and town halls.

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And we need a transnational movement

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where these spaces
can learn from each other,

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just like cities have about everything,

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from urban farming to public art

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to rapid transit.

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Humanity moves forward

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when we find new ways

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to rely on and and understand
and trust each other.

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And we need this now more than ever.

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If online digital spaces
are going to be our new home,

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let's make them a comfortable,
beautiful place to live.

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A place we all fell not just included,

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but actually some ownership of.

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A place we get to know each other.

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A place you'd actually want

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not just to visit, but to bring your kids.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)