The New Enlightenment with Ashley

This video explains how the social media algorithms have an incentive to manufacture polarization in order to make click bait more effective.

This video explains an update that I think the field of economics needs to make that would work to explain power dynamics. This update would relax the assumption of exogenous preferences and instead acknowledge that people's preferences attune to the powerful and socially engaging people. This could be accounted for in a meta-cost-benefit model that asked "How much time and energy should I spend developing a preference?" where the social and economic payoff for having a preference drove the cost-benefit of preference choice.

This video (a) explains liquid democracy, (b) compares it to direct democracy and representative democracy, and (c) articulates the strengths and drawbacks of each system. It discusses liquid democracy as a system to experiment with for social media governance.

This video explains how social media algorithms have changed and evolved over time. I include a discussion of the evolutionary mechanism, diminishing marginal benefits, and several stages of the algorithm's development.

This video explains Brene Brown's concept of the shitty first draft and how this relates to the mean girls' phenomena on social media.

This video explains the term "Interpretive structure" and discusses why this relates to the conversation about social media.

This video explains what a data union is and how it can be used to help solve some of the problems with social media. I was inspired by the following talk by Jaron Lanier, who discusses data unions at ~1:14:05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOlqzMd2Zw

This video explains the life-cycle of leaderless movements and the problems they face. Specifically, they can easily be hijacked or discredited by either nefarious or unintentional actors.

How do you find hope in times of social unrest? This video makes the argument that the answer lies in finding ways of building, rather than destroying, to address the broader societal ills.

This video describes Oren Cass' vision of co-ops as unions of the future from his book, The Once and Future Worker. I also give commentary, on the two sources of power that Cass proposes for the co-ops, to give them leverage when negotiating against firms.

This video explains the two realms that concern this channel: social media and power concentration. I explore the relationship between the two. Sources referenced in the video include: Video on large investment firm influence over the corporate ecosystem: https://youtu.be/OERw_rbpTQQ Article by Michael Lind on the social power of the elite class… https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-national-american-elite

This video explains how YouTube rabbit holes work using the concepts of priming and time traps. We employ backwards induction, primary goals for the algorithms and secondary goals for the algorithms in our investigation of the problem.

Why do we put people into boxes? What does this have to do with walking on eggshells with each other? And what are other ways of handling the best motives behind looking for boxes to put people into?

This video gives a description of what a blockchain might look like that would collect evidence to fight corruption within organizations.

This video gives an overview of the book The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles. I connect it to the cryptocurrency movement and the modern problems with inequality. I also show how it relates to classic economics and explain why it is compelling.

This video explores the reasons why social media algorithms favor national news over local news.

This is a follow up video on the book Captured Economy, where I think about supply-side vs. demand-side problems with credentialling, and the impact of credentialling changes on low-skilled workers.

How is it possible that nobody knows the methods social media algorithms use to achieve their goals? I explore this idea by imagining a detective trying to figure out how YouTube leads people to flat earth videos.

I discuss the good points and critique of the book Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz.

How could researchers go about testing the hypothesis that social media is showing content that puts us into a state of threat and anxiety? I offer some thoughts and also offer some critiques of these methods.

This video makes an argument why it could be rational to distrust facts from people who hold you in contempt. I also relate this to some of the problems we are seeing on social media.

This video explains why I am hesitant to use buzz words from the blockchain space, even though I want to talk about these tools. Words like Web 3.0, NFT, oracle, and crypto could eventually be displaced.

This video explains what distributed social media is and gives three visions for what it might look like. I discuss how it might allow different users to operate under different rules of governance, and how it might allow different managers of the different types of capital on distributed social media.

This video describes how social media distorts our frame of reality by creating false binaries that suck us in and move us toward one side or the other. It looks at the with-us-or-against-us mentality of social media, the false perception that single facts should change our minds, and the invisibility of facts outside these binary frames.

How do people change their minds? What advantages and disadvantages does the online space have compared with in-person conversation, and vice-versa.