> which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.

Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by almost everyone, though, as an analogy?

Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.

> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.

I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.

I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.

I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.

That’s exactly the lens they were hoping for

It means it's addictive

Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"

@dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.

Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.

this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.

Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.