jeff Jarvis was born in 1954 and studied journalism at Northwestern University in Illinois. He worked as a television critic and created the magazine Entertainment Weeklyand later headed the online division of American media company Advance Publications. Since 2001, he has blogged on Buzzmachine.com and in 2005 he became an associate professor at the graduate school of journalism at the City University of New York, directing its new media program before retiring last year. Jarvis, who lives in New York, co-hosts the podcasts. This week on Google and AI inside.
What made you want to write? your new book, The network we weave?
My simplistic answer is that someone has to defend Internet freedoms because I fear they are under attack. It is important to say that I am not defending corporations or the current owners of the Internet, but I do believe that the moral panic over the Internet will lead to regulation that affects everyone’s freedoms. This became more critical of the media coverage than I had anticipated.
Why do you think the media turned against the Internet and big technology?
The media has been immersed in moral panics for a long time. What separates this media moral panic from others is the conflict of interest involved: From the media’s point of view, this new technology competes with them for both viewership and advertising dollars, and that is rarely revealed. In my book, I chronicle Rupert Murdoch’s Internet failures and the billions of dollars he wasted. He decided to activate it because he couldn’t achieve it. He Wall Street Journal He fired the first shot with a series demonizing the cookie and ad targeting.
Yes, but social networks give a megaphone to our worst instincts and voices…
It does, but it also allows communities to come together that weren’t there before. To be clear, I’m an old white guy who learns things very late in life, but I’ve learned a lot from reading the scholars of black Twitter: André Brock Jr, Charlton McIlwain, Meredith Clark. The Internet also allowed these communities to come together in a way that they could not because they were not heard in the media.
In the book, you tell Shoshana Zuboff and other critics of surveillance capitalism to get a grip. Because?
I object to Zuboff’s use of the term “surveillance,” especially today when we have governments that have the power of law, incarceration, fines, and guns behind them as they surveil populations. Therefore, trivializing surveillance by characterizing advertising cookies as something offensive and exaggerated to me. Should there be changes around ad targeting? Sure, but I don’t think it starts with that kind of siren call.
Intuitively, it seems right to me when someone says that phones and social media are negatively affecting our mental health. Why do you reject that?
Reading the literature on this, it is clear that the research is far from definitive in any sense. When we blame the telephone for young people’s problems, we once again overlook much more serious issues. In America, children are afraid to go to school because (fear) of being shot. Young women increasingly no longer have control over their bodies. They are inheriting a climate that we screwed up. They are in the middle of a fascist takeover of the country. Oh yeah, let’s blame the phones.
What is your opinion on AI?
I’m more afraid of the AI guys than their AI. The problem is that they have corrupted the language around it, so the word “security” is now meaningless because fatalists treat security as if it does not destroy humanity, when there are very real security issues that need to be addressed around to bias and fraud and the environment, etc. That’s why it’s hard to have the conversation now because we don’t have common terms.
What impact will the Trump administration have on regulation and, more broadly, on his vision of taking back the Internet?
I think the companies themselves will not be regulated, unless Donald Trump doesn’t like them. And this is what we saw at the last moment with (Jeff) Bezos’ horrible response. Washington Post editorial decision and with Meta trying to get away from all politics. No one wants to make judgments because it is expensive and risky to do so. On the one hand, we will find companies and investors going crazy. On the other hand, we will see some vindictive actions by Trumpists against certain companies because they believe they have been discriminated against.
Are you surprised by how far certain Silicon Valley billionaires have leaned to the right?
I think we shouldn’t be surprised by the corrupting venality of billions of dollars, and I think that’s what we saw at work in some of those cases. The argument I heard during the election was: “Well, maybe the tycoons have gone to the right, but the workers haven’t.” I don’t know. Not long ago, Google employees rebelled against machine learning and defense. So far, I haven’t heard any rumors of a revolt by Anthropic workers against working with the evil Palantir empire to obtain defense contracts. So I don’t know where the pulse of Silicon Valley will be, and I fear it may go further or further into a safety cave.
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Do you think Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk will go the distance?
(laughs) God knows. It’s often said that they both want the limelight, so this won’t work, but Trump loves billionaires and crazy, outlandish conversations. And Musk obviously loves being at the center of power. His investment in Twitter seemed crazy, and it was certainly damaging, but it gave him this power, and this power led to Tesla’s stock going up. So it probably turned out to be a good investment in ruining America. I don’t think it’s going to disappear.
One of their solutions to improving the Internet is to demote geeks. That feels hard to imagine.
Yes, but looking back in history, it becomes less difficult. The printers were very important in the beginning, they made all the decisions and then they were simply hired to do industrial work. Similarly, radio was kind of a mysterious technology until it wasn’t, and I think the same will apply to the internet and eventually AI. With AI, I think, ironically – and unintentionally – it is the geeks who demean themselves. I’m not a coder, but now I can make a computer do what I want without coders. In the end, it is not difficult to imagine that anyone can tell the machine what they want to do and it will do it without the intervention of technologists.