Twenty Eighty-Four: A Fictional Podcast

A fictional podcast interview set in the year 2084

Two endosymbionts, half-human and half-AI, sat down in their respective studios for a video podcast interview. Joan Rogain is the host of the show Experience.gov. Starlinking in on this particular day from Mars — a planet accelerating towards ecological calamity — is her guest, Elaine Mosk.

— June 8, 2084

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Rogain: “Thank you Elaine for coming back to our show. I’m admiring that wonderful background of Hellas Planitia Crater on the screen behind you.”

Mosk: “Appreciate you having me back Joan, and that background is actually a live feed from Earth of an electric vehicle battery disposal depot. But thank you.”

Rogain: “Let’s get right down into it. Let’s talk about craters, specifically the cratering of free speech in the 21st century. Looking back, how did technology, particularly the Internet, impact free speech?”

Mosk: “As you know, since the pre-endosymbiont era of human evolution, power structures moderated speech through gatekeeping, regulation, and enforcement. But the Internet brought that to a whole new level. That’s because most speech on the Internet occurred under the aegis of private companies, on ‘Private Squares’ where it was unprotected, and ultimately served private interests.”

Rogain: “For the younger minds tuning in who might not be familiar with the word Internet, could you briefly explain what that was?”

Mosk: “Oh, sorry, yes. The Internet was this mythical idea — some might call it a conspiracy theory — that people used to live, work, and play on a primitive network of private and public computers connected through TCP/IP. It was supposedly how humans used to communicate, sometimes even with other people sitting across from each other at lunch.”

Rogain: “Why is it thought to have become so popular?”

Mosk: “In a sense, it put enormous powers of communication in the hands of the people. Literally. At least that’s what we thought initially. Little did we know…”

Rogain: “That didn’t quite turn out to be true, did it?”

Mosk: “Looking in the rear-view mirror it’s a no-brainer to see what was happening. Once the general public got on the Internet — maybe even got dependent on it or addicted to it — something weird started to happen. There are those who say that websites and mobile apps started to ban some people from having a voice on their platforms. People had been lulled into the belief that the Internet was a utopian public place where everyone was welcome and had a voice. This was clearly not the case, yet everyone had complacently signed user agreements attesting that they understood this — basically without reading these ‘adhesion contracts’ they voluntarily agreed to descend into capito-feudalism. It turned out that virtually everywhere people went on the Internet they were visiting private property. And private proprietors have a right to serve whomever they want and exclude whomever they want from their ‘Private Squares.’ But some felt that the proprietors executed their ‘gotchas’ only after everyone had settled on their properties and in some cases had built their lives and businesses around the settlements. This apparently caused quite an uproar, though no one actually heard it.”

Rogain: “What do you mean? Censorship discussions were censored?”

Mosk: “There is no proof of that. Without proof, it’s a baseless claim. Baseless claims get purged. The digital immune system is not unlike a biological immune system in the way it responds to potential threats. In a biological power structure, a system of antibodies tags agents that might pose a threat, then a second system of macrophages deletes anything tagged as potentially unsafe. In a digital power structure, one layer of private companies identifies and tags nonconforming speech as ‘baseless’ or ‘misinformation’ or ‘unfounded,’ and a second layer of private companies deletes the tagged speech. The biomimicry is beautiful.”

Rogain: “They also say Solovki is beautiful in the summer. Couldn’t those excluded from these ‘Private Squares’ on the Internet create their own mimicked versions?”

Mosk: “In theory yes; in practice, no. All roads to get on the Internet — mobile companies, web hosting companies, and ISPs — were also controlled by private companies. Those excluded from popular ‘Private Squares’ built their own squares to express their voices, but private companies that owned the roads leading to those squares blocked access to them, too. Podcasts like The Experience and The Portal disappeared overnight after inspectors tagged them for hosting content that they deemed unsafe. Supposedly, they even kept lists.”

Rogain: “What kind of lists?”

Mosk: “Actually, the existence of lists has been controversial. The idea itself was supposedly tagged as a conspiracy theory and scrubbed. So this list that apparently never existed reportedly banned some people from all the private roads that allowed access to the Internet. These people couldn’t even register their complaints to regulators online because the road from their computer to the government’s computers had to pass through private property first.”

Rogain: “Is this when the Internet turned into a collection of private clubs?”

Mosk: “The online world had always been a collection of private clubs. But unlike traditional clubs, digital clubs worked backwards. They let everyone in at first, showed them the goods, then began pruning membership according to ever-changing membership rules. The main ‘good’ they showed people was each other — essentially everyone was already a member. If you got ‘dis-membered’ for not conforming to the rules, you were denied access to your own community. Needless to say, nearly everyone was motivated to play ball in order to stay within their speech bubbles.”

Rogain: “What is a speech bubble?”

Mosk: “Young ones out there may think I’m referring to how cartoon characters talk to each other. A speech bubble is a pod of endosymbionts who speak as if they share a consensus belief, such as ‘Mars is Round.’ The bubble protects them from nonconforming information. If the meme ‘Mars is Flat’ tries to enter the bubble, the memetic antibody system tags it and the memetic macrophage system deletes it. The bubble remains safe. That’s how it works.”

Rogain: “How is that different from a thought bubble?”

Mosk: “A thought bubble has a double meaning. It means a club whose member thoughts are protected from intruding thoughts, but it also can mean where you put thoughts that you don’t want to say out loud, as a way to communicate to the outside world, the way cartoon characters do. In theory, one could belong to the ‘Mars is Flat’ thought bubble while simultaneously belonging to the ‘Mars is Round’ speech bubble.”

Rogain: “I belong to the ‘Mars is Oblong’ speech bubble and the ‘Mars is a Klein-bottle’ thought bubble. How about you?”

Mosk: “I’m a validated citizen here so I had no choice. I had to sign up for the ‘MarsTM is a Candy Bar’ speech bubble.”

Rogain: “Thank you. That fulfills the contractually obligated mention of our sponsor. Back to our programming…what happened to those excluded from all of these private clubs?”

Mosk: “Not sure. As far the Internet private clubs were concerned, those nonconforming voices didn’t exist. The only stories heard were those from what Dr. Eric Weinstein once called the ‘Gated Institutional Narrative’ or GIN.”

Rogain: “Wow. I’ve never heard that story before.”

Mosk: [shifts uncomfortably] “Me neither. And you certainly didn’t hear that from me.”

Rogain: “Meanwhile, I remember once hearing rumors, before they were deleted by fact checkers, about the existence of a club called the House of Clubs. What have you heard?”

Mosk: “No one knows the full story because the developer who found the stone inscription about it trimmed it into the shape of a dining room tabletop. Machine learning algorithms decoded the remaining parts of the story as follows. People fearing Internet censorship jumped ship to an unrecorded audio-format club called the House of Clubs. Like most private resort developments, they focused on exclusive membership until everyone wanted to join, and then they let everyone in. Thereafter, it duplicated the Internet experience. The first year was mostly a euphoria of self-congratulations; the second year was a dysphoria of free-speech violations, although it was now slander instead of libel; in the third year someone sent a House of Clubs invitation to a person claiming to be a former famous public official. After that person’s first word, the private mobile carrier erased everything associated with House of Clubs, including all the secret recordings.”

Rogain: “I also remember once hearing rumors — again they were later deleted by fact checkers — that those marginalized by private companies eventually returned to the sanctuary of the ‘old’ Internet, the original hardware network of the pre-1990s, where they apparently could speak freely.”

Mosk: “To be fair, that ‘free’ Internet was also audience-free. It was supposedly hard to find people and find information, just like the bad old days [laughs]. Moreover, even this ‘public’ venue was a gated community that required sophistication and credentialed access, which only the privileged few had.”

Rogain: “It’s been said, and often repeated, that those excluded from speech on the Internet were welcome to vocalize their thoughts on a personal porch or a public town square.”

Mosk: “Fact-check: true. However, when compared to the vast reach of the Internet, the reach of speech in town squares was limited; analog public squares were actually all-but-private squares. And that brings us to a larger point. Although freedom of speech remained intact, powers arising from free speech — the primary reason that speech was protected — became hierarchical, with greater powers accruing to speech that served at the pleasure of their private masters.”

Rogain: “Why is that important?”

Mosk: “Long lost in the debate about free speech was the underlying reason for its protection: to decentralize power. Resistance against abuses of power had been the raison d’être of America’s First Amendment, and free speech had been intended to serve this aim. Yet, since asymmetry of power is the root of tyranny, it was not freedom of speech per se but the growing asymmetry of the power arising from speech that should have been the greater concern. Alas, few noticed this at the time.”

Rogain: “What were the rest of the folks paying attention to?”

Mosk: “Not sure. Probably everything but the truth. But that’s just a wild guess. It’s also true that some people voluntarily attended re-education camps where they read books like Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel and Brave New World.”

Rogain: “I love those books. But the tone of your voice suggests some skepticism.”

Mosk: “I love those books too. I love getting my brain washed. My mind tends to pick up a lot of dirt, a lot of static, when I am out there. So I get my self-driving brain washed every couple of weeks. It’s right next to the place I get my self-driving car washed. I’m joking of course. Getting brainwashed is not as healthy for you as it sounds. Many generations of people got brainwashed into fearing the state as the ruler of thought. Orwell’s and Huxley’s books were commonly used brands of brain shampoo.”

Rogain: “Are you saying that these books about brainwashing are themselves brainwashers?”

Mosk: “I didn’t say that at all. You said that. The books were great. They inspired civil libertarians to guard against totalitarian states. In Orwell’s Oceania, the state controlled people through fear and force. In Huxley’s World State, a unified world government controlled people through natural inclinations. Unfortunately, these books misled civil libertarians in one important way. In reality, it’s not the fact that Oceania or the World State city of London are all-powerful states that makes them fear-worthy; it’s that they are all-powerful. Period. But not all omnipotent superorganisms are states. Some are private superorganisms.”

Rogain: “Hold on. Are you saying that we should be fearful of omnipotent superorganisms as a class, and not totalitarian states as a subclass?”

Mosk: “I didn’t say that. You said that. Again, you are probably right. While the civil libertarian thought bubble was focused on guarding against the overreach of state government — the First Amendment is an example — private superorganisms ate the world and became far more potent power structures. Unfortunately, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World ended up directing human social antibodies away from the emerging ruling class — the private sector.”

Rogain: “How could these private corporations be more powerful than the state?”

Mosk: “In a sense, they were not: the state always has had a monopoly on legal violence. But in another sense, they were. That’s because the average elected official collects more money from private contributions than from the public treasury. When public officials end up working more for private interests than public interests, the state becomes a division of the private sector. It’s a bloodless coup.”

Rogain: “What role does the average person play in all this — especially in regard to speech?”

Mosk: “The average person stares up at power structures from a down-dog position. For most of human history, these power structures were the state or the church. But suddenly people found themselves also staring up at even more gargantuan private power structures. It turns out that the only thing worse than a power monopoly of government is a power oligopoly of profit-gorging private corporations; the latter is incentivized to compete to drain your tank. The central question then becomes, ‘What power does the average person have to change the situation?’”

Rogain: “Which brings us to what you claim is our most valuable fixed-quantity resource.”

Mosk: [chuckles] “Ha. That’s a bit of a sore point in our family. Who knew that Satoshi Nakamoto — a name that silly people thought translated to ‘Central Intelligence’ when in fact cryptography experts decoded it to mean ‘Middle Intelligence’ — would start speed-printing more Bitcoins through a backdoor after China had cornered the market? You may have read from the book History Has Never Been Written by the Winners, which won in the best nonfiction category for literature — in it my great-grandfather tried in vain to warn everyone against buying Bitcoin. But everyone ignored him for being a ‘the-sky-is-falling’ pessimist. Once that bubble burst, it dawned on the world that the most valuable finite commodity was not Bitcoin but human attention. By that point, however, it was much too late.”

Rogain: “The world has woken up to many harsh truths. But why was it too late?”

Mosk: “You have to understand The Thing. The Thing is attention, and when it comes to speech, attention is the currency of power. Attention is a scarce resource that to some extent is always distributed unequally. But technology significantly worsened attention inequality. But unlike other important measures of inequality, attention inequality somehow eluded the world’s attention. Whereas the ratio of attention inequality may have been a hundred to one in primitive human societies, the ratio skyrocketed to six billion to one in the digital age. That apex alpha in the attention economy happened to be my ancestor, which is why I am here — not just on Mars, but at all.”

Rogain: “Who is more powerful: an apex alpha hogging The Thing on a website, or a website that determines whether the apex alpha is allowed to speak at all?”

Mosk: “That depends. On the surface, one would have guessed that the website is. People eventually noticed — a bit too slowly, from my perspective — the private sector’s undue influence on allocating The Thing. This authority raised the specter of private sector tyranny even while freedom of speech remained protected by the First Amendment. If anything, over focusing on defending free speech, which of course is critical, without also tending to the growing attention inequality created a false sense of security about larger existential risks.”

Rogain: “Say more about attention inequality.”

Mosk: “Sure. Up to a point, private companies could freely dictate who was allowed to have a voice on their websites. Moreover, their algorithms determined allocation of The Thing to each speaker. For example, shadow banning was a popular way to downrank dissenting voices. Over time, the system preferentially selected digital marionettes whose speech pleased their masters. At the same time there was a growing chorus in broader society calling for all voices to be heard, particularly those from the disenfranchised. There were also voices calling out the growing wealth inequality, part of which derives from attention inequality. These forces all eventually collided.”

Rogain: “What were some of the initial policy reforms? What impact did they have?”

Mosk: “Reforms — some initiated by the companies themselves and others initiated by regulators — had some beneficial impact. The idea was to diffuse the gatekeeping powers and attention allocating powers of private companies. Transparency requirements regarding terms of service, bans, and feed algorithms reduced some of the harmful attention allocation policies that had fueled attention inequality. Some companies even adopted policies and social feed algorithms that redistributed attention to the most needy. Meanwhile, some nations levied a progressive ‘attention tax’ on digital marionettes, deleting up to a quarter of their followers every year and returning their attention to the commons. They were part of a larger movement to decentralize the growing inequality of power associated with speech.”

Rogain: “Why did these early policies ultimately fail?”

Mosk: “Natural inclinations and free markets: in other words, useful things that happen to make the world go around. Think about it. Users naturally pay attention to the powerful, and competition for attention invariably produces attention inequality. Do-gooder companies trying to redistribute attention more equitably were fighting human instincts, and that didn’t work out so well. In the free market economy they were displaced by other startups that eagerly stepped in to serve innate human instincts: a classic race to the bottom where you can pretty much predict the winners. It was all but inevitable that more drastic reforms would be needed.”

Rogain: “Speaking of drastic reforms, say a few words about Section 230, the twenty-six words credited with killing the Internet.”

Mosk: “By the time early Internet pioneers realized that they had unleashed a beast, it was too unwieldy to corral except by undoing the source code, and that’s Section 230. By providing online publishers immunity against liability arising from republishing harmful and in some cases the illegal speech of third parties — even anonymous ones — Section 230 turned the Internet into a cesspool of radioactive speech. The SPEECH Act of 2010 provided Americans further immunity by protecting them from British law’s interpretations of defamation — that the burden of proof is on the accused and not the accuser. Social epidemiologists today are still tracking the number of cancerous human behaviors that emerged during that era. Some think it may have negatively affected a million people over the ensuing decades. Some think it was a billion.”

Rogain: “The official count remains zero.”

Mosk: “That’s why people didn’t trust it. If they had just said the official count was, say, 6869 or some other prime number, people might have believed it, and then everyone could have come to an agreement. But zero sounded too absolute. So do a million and a billion, by the way.”

Rogain: “Officials never found the smoking gun, as they say.”

Mosk: “But they found secondhand smoke everywhere, which they never say. Meanwhile, trying to clean up this radioactive spill at the time was not easy. After 2010, special interests were able to unite against citizens by making unlimited contributions to political candidates. As you might imagine, Internet companies were hell bent on keeping their Section 230 superpowers.”

Rogain: “We are all very grateful that your great-grandfather was able to use his freedom to donate Dogecoins to super PACs so that the repeal of Section 230 could be attached onto the 100th anniversary of the original Farm Bill.”

Mosk: “Yes — fortunately cryptocurrency price manipulation was still legal back then so he did what he would have done anyway but without having to give up any board seats. By soaking up nearly all the attention of the public, he used the exact tools of attention economy robber barons against themselves. Thanks in no small part to his ability to pump up Dogecoin through his massive online fanbase, he had built a personal balance sheet larger than that of all private companies in the world combined. In doing so, he became the highest bidder for domestic political servants. That’s the Aikido move.”

Rogain: “What effect did repealing Section 230 have?”

Mosk: “The repeal put the powers of online publishers on a level with those of print publishers. Since re-publishers of third-party content were suddenly held to the same standards as their print counterparts, each publisher became motivated to moderate speech according to the long established laws of libel and slander rather than to their own proprietary terms of service. In other words, the Internet became orderly and decent again.”

Rogain: “Is that when trolls became an endangered species?”

Mosk: “I wish. But to your point, at least trolling became far less common. That’s what happens when the comment section of every webpage has to be approved due to fear of the law, just like in print media. As the power to cancel someone went from the court of public opinion back to the courts, witch hunts became harder. Before Section 230’s repeal, for example, one could easily defame enemies online using fake accounts, then have online newspapers publish those libelous statements with impunity. By contrast, during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, they had to find real people to form mobs. All in all, after Section 230’s repeal, people returned to citing others’ work on their own page rather than citing one’s work on other people’s pages. It was quaint.”

Rogain: “Who knew that 1984 would later be remembered so fondly as a quaint era?”

Mosk: “That’s right. Internet revolutionaries-turned-reactionaries thought they had finally gotten the system back to where it had all started: their digital Garden of Eden — or at least a weedy garden of self-published websites. That was a good thing for sure. I think. At a minimum, it was better than the newspaper oligopoly era, since the Internet had lowered the bar so anyone could become their own publisher. That bit of decentralization was looking pretty good for democratizing speech.”

Rogain: “Yet even with the repeal of Section 230, the battle for democratizing speech was only just beginning.”

Mosk: “Absolutely. That’s because repealing Section 230 had no effect on another layer of private gatekeepers lurking in the machine: ISPs, mobile companies, and web-hosting services. They could throttle anyone’s speech or Robinhood trade orders according to their own terms. Eliminating this private layer, however, would have made the Internet an even darker place, where no one could find people or information. The world found itself in a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t quandary.”

Rogain: “Is this when the state took over the speech business?”

Mosk: “To be less inaccurate, the state had already been presiding over online speech, thanks to the Patriot Act. So it was just a step change. What changed was, in order to keep speech free from the menace of private sector censorship, the government decided to duplicate all services offered on the Internet by the private sector, including ISPs, web hosting, mobile devices — even Twitter.”

Rogain: “I was a bit shocked to learn that the domain name Twitter.gov was available.”

Mosk: “Yes, it was made available through the auction site Amazon-eBay by a former NSA employee who had grabbed a bunch of ‘.gov’ domain names and retired to Russia. I think the U.S. bought back the Twitter.gov domain name for 0.0006869 Dogecoins by speed-printing it. In retrospect, it’s hard to remember that the Internet at some point was not under full government control, from logging in through state-controlled ISPs to self-publishing on government pages using IDs validated through brain-retina scans. Having become terrified of their private sector overlords, people were seeking refuge in the once-feared Orwellian nirvana of state totalitarianism.”

Rogain: “So why did this Orwellian utopia collapse?”

Mosk: “My liege, you can probably answer that yourself. But here’s a thought. You have to remember that the government has always sought public commentary on public works. However, the state failed to foresee that when something is free, like speech, people would use unlimited amounts of it. That’s essentially what happened. People used their state-given right to free speech by using up all remaining hard drive space on government servers within two years of government launching duplicate services.”

Rogain: “Couldn’t they charge the public a small amount for free speech, like entrance fees to get into Amazon-Smithsonian, to add new servers to the network?”

Mosk: “The government did briefly experiment with paid speech. But paid speech turned all online content into pop-up ads. So they abandoned that program over the next ten to twenty years. That left the state without a viable business model for online free speech. By this point, no one — not even China — wanted to buy any more data about U.S. citizens on the black market, including their neuro-retinal scans. It was feared that adding more data points might reduce the predictive value of user behavior below the prevailing standard of 100 percent accuracy.”

Rogain: “That’s some food for thought.”

Mosk: “Meanwhile, the state couldn’t get anyone to erase old speech to make room for new speech. By mid-century, after recurring scandals involving public officials, erasing federal hard drives had become a felonious offense. Eventually, as we tell our endosymbiont offspring during bedtime stories, all storage space for free speech got used up. And the state’s network got stuck in an infinite loop.”

Rogain: “Let me try to summarize. The private sector took over the public Internet, the government took over the private sector takeover of the Internet, the public took over the government servers, and that was all she wrote.”

Mosk: “I believe the last words typed on the Internet before the Big Freeze was ‘Arghh.’ Don’t quote me on that.”

Rogain: “What quotable lessons can we take away from all this?”

Mosk: “Here are my takes on it. When power concentrates, it can harm the disempowered. It can also stymie progress by deterring competition. My guess is that’s why nature redistributes biological power through aging, and humans redistribute socioeconomic and political power through taxes and term limits. I wish we had long ago added attention redistribution to that list. Attention is one of those weird commodities that tend to form self-feeding loops: individuals tend to bestow their attention on those with the most power. Looking back, the Internet offered the tantalizing promise of democratizing attention by disintermediating the gate-keeping powers of print, radio, and television oligarchies. However, Internet companies disintermediated this disintermediation to form an even more powerful oligarchy. But hindsight is 2020.”

Rogain: “Any final thoughts?”

Mosk: “In the broader context, it was evident by 2020 that free speech, while not technically done, was functionally done. When it wasn’t gatekeepers and mobs censoring speech, individuals self-censored to avoid being cancelled. While person-to-person speech remained free, since such speech lacked potency, the power structures left it, and free speech defenders, alone. In retrospect, I wish folks could have seen that the debates about free speech back then were just part of the diversion, the bread and circus of the ruling class. The debates ought to have been about power.”

Rogain: “So glad we could broadcast these thoughts to our audience via Neuralink without saying a word. Thanks again for joining us.”

Copyright © 2021 Joon Yun. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE FICTIONAL PODCAST

Twenty Eighty-Four: A Fictional Podcast is a futuristic fictional podcast interview on Experience.gov between two characters, Joan Rogain the host and Elaine Mosk the guest, set in the year 2084. The two banter on what they think happened to freedom of speech in the century following the birth of the Internet. It’s one part a mockumentary of a popular interview format that emerged during the online era. It’s another part a commentary about the challenges to individual freedoms in the technology age. As a whole, Twenty Eighty-Four: A Fictional Podcast presents podcast fiction as a new genre of its own.