@jack Dorsey
@jack Dorsey
Tech and Freedom
(Fragment 3 of the full transcript being prepared by me.)
So who do you have to ask for permission? (1) Government, (2) corporation, (3) your self. Number one we discussed a little bit which is the government. The government is very similar to number two which is a corporation. The difference is a government has a monopoly on violence. It has an army. It can force you to do things through weapons. While you may think you own a piece of property, or you own a piece of clothing, or anything that you feel like you have ownership over, it's actually just a lease from the government. They're giving you permission to continue to own it. They can seize it at any point if you do something that is against their policy or against their laws, or against their their rules. So there is no true ownership with this monopoly of violence. [00:06:24]
A corporation is a little bit different. It's actually considered to be a citizen with the rights of a citizen but has super rights as well which reduces the liability on individuals and puts them into this abstract shadow. So they can do things that a government necessarily couldn't do, an individual couldn't do. And a lot of the power of those permission sets that we talked about money, speech, and intelligence are going into corporations. [00:06:59]
So, almost every interaction you have today through your phone is backed by some company, and that company has one person ultimately who is leading it, and that one person represents a single point of failure. If the government wants to coerce that person, they can put pressure through their monopoly of violence, and they can force that CEO, force that leader of the company to do things that they want. [00:07:28]
All these corporations have business models. They have profit incentive. You are not their customer, especially within social media. You are actually the product. The advertisers are the customer. And when the advertisers want something done, and they say if you don't do this we're going to pull our advertising money, and it hurts your business, those corporations are going to act. And you see this in traditional media and you see this in social media as well. [00:07:56]
The final entity that you have to ask for permission is yourself. We build up identity. We build up ego. We build up an understanding of how people relate to us and think about us. You've heard this term “cancel culture”, and what it means to be judged by the culture, or be judged by society, or be judged by a community, and that is this implicit permission that you're forcing yourself to do. You're not going to do certain things because you fear potentially how it might build up your identity, or take away from your identity, or your reputation. And what I'm going to talk about for the majority of this talk is how you take that back, how you become more self-aware, and how you recognize where you're asking for permission, and where through better technology you can build it for yourself. [00:08:56]
(To be continued)