YouTube, the Great Radicalizer
It&#x27;s not youtube. It&#x27;s not facebook. It&#x27;s not twitter. You can write this article about any company these days.<p>It&#x27;s a deeper fundamental devil&#x27;s cocktail of monetized attention + modern (intensely and immediately metrics driven) product development + our buggy brains. Any company who wants to make money from the attention of human beings will find the same extraordinarily rapid pull to extremism. That&#x27;s what we click. Our brains <i>love</i> these extreme things. The companies are just molding themselves to our brains in real time.<p>So much of public discourse these last few years has been pulled towards these most base human bugs. Fear of the &quot;other&quot;, violence, tragedy, banal comedy, sexual deviancy,  cute shiny this or that, inspirational platitudes. Even worse, the content production itself is now being hooked up directly to the metrics creating a machine learning feedback loop spinning out of control.<p>Any company who wants to fight against this needs to sign up for public, immediate, and painful metrics hits. We saw this happen so directly with facebook last quarter. These problems are so fundamental that if one company tries to fight against it and turn back the dials, another won&#x27;t and the company attempting integrity will flat out start to lose. Our best shot is to create completely different incentive structures. In the current overarching architecture of media and technology, this hell is the clear winner.