Renée DiResta: It's a great David versus Goliath narrative, but it's ultimately a marketing ploy.

Brooke Gladstone: Have news influencers once these scrappy newbies of the internet become the media's main power brokers. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, YouTuber Hank Green on what he knows about the internet now that he didn't in the early days.

Hank Green: The biggest thing I didn't know is how easily it could be used for evil, Micah. I really didn't expect that.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, why the mega rich want to escape the reality that they've created for the rest of us.

Douglas Rushkoff: We're just the first stage on the rocket, the disposable stage that they can jettison once they've made it to the next level, and I promise you, they're not going to make it.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. They say stand up to the threat of censorship. Don't obey in advance. Seems like some in the media didn't get that memo.

Mika Brzezinski: "Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump. It was the first time we have seen him in seven years."

Brooke Gladstone: Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Monday.

Joe Scarborough: "And it's going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, that we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so."

Mika Brzezinski: "What we did agree on was to restart communications."

Brooke Gladstone: The backdrop of that meeting, an anxious climate at MSNBC and the media more broadly. Threats from Donald Trump to revoke licenses for broadcasters. Recent legal letters from Trump threatening the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast and Random House, and news this week that Comcast plans to spin off MSNBC and other channels into a new, smaller company.

Micah Loewinger: Morning Joe viewership took a nosedive after the Florida visit. CNN has also seen a decline. At a time when more and more people are getting their news from social media, perhaps in part because influencers seem less compromised than the legacy press. A new Pew Research report this week found that roughly 20% of Americans and 37% of adults under 30 are getting their news from content creators.

Most of the accounts with over 100,000 followers are men with no professional journalistic training. They're also slightly more likely to be right leaning. To understand this new media landscape, we're going to need to update some old ideas about how powerful institutions spread their messages. For that, we turn to Renée DiResta, Georgetown University research professor and author of the book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. She recently revisited the theory outlined by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent. Renée, welcome back to the show.

Renée DiResta: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Let's just start by outlining what Chomsky and Herman proposed to begin with.

Renée DiResta: They built what they called a propaganda model, a model that tried to explain how propaganda and systemic biases exist within what they were talking about at the time, the sort of corporate mass media. The thing that I really like about the book is that it articulates this system of incentives that he calls the five filters. There's a image that you can envision of like kind of coffee dripping through a filter. Filter 1 is the ownership of the medium. Medium might not be as objective, or it might self censor if it's afraid of creating a conflict with something else that the owner also owns. Filter 2 is funding sources, so at the time largely advertising. Maybe you don't want to write something that's going to piss off your advertiser. He talks a lot about sourcing as kind of Filter 3, who the paper's sources are, and the reporter's potential fear of alienating a source.

The fourth filter that they discuss is flak, which refers to complaints that might come in, lawsuits, public condemnation, people writing angry letters, government people complaining about it. At the time, the idea was that flak would reinforce conformity by discouraging dissent or discouraging controversial opinions that might lead to the generation of the flak.

The last thing that he really emphasizes at the time he was writing it was anti-communism, the argument that media had to be anti-communist in order to rally people around a shared ideological enemy. Again, this was during the Cold War, but he's expanded it. They wrote a little bit of an update after September 11, arguing that it was really just fear ideology, the sort of fear of an other, and that media did best when it had somebody to turn into a villain. All in, what he argues in the book is that this creates a very narrow, filtered perspective. At the time he was writing, there was a much more homogenous and limited media environment.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, at the time, a lot of newspapers relied much more on advertising than they did on, say, subscriptions. I mean, just the business models of news were pretty fundamentally different even from the legacy media now.

Renée DiResta: It's very much a snapshot of a moment in time in the 1980s, but it reflects this concern that media is not telling you everything because it is not incentivized to. It's reflecting some of that distrust. At the same time, he does make the point that this isn't an anti-media argument. It's an argument to be informed. It's an argument to understand that when you consume something, you should understand what might be motivating it.

Micah Loewinger: Naturally, some journalists have quibbled with Chomsky's argument over the years.

Renée DiResta: Absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: In the great documentary also called Manufacturing Consent, about Chomsky and the book from 1992, here's how one New York Times editor responded.

Karl Meyer: "If one takes literally the various theories that Professor Chomsky puts out, one would feel that there is a tacit conspiracy between the establishment press and the government in Washington to focus on certain things and ignore certain things, so that if we broke the rules we would instantly get a reaction, a sharp reaction from the overlords in Washington. We didn't hear a thing."

Micah Loewinger: That did ring true with me that like, it's easy to see this as a very deliberate system rather than maybe a series of nudges one after another.

Renée DiResta: When you read these social media posts of people who are distrustful of media, they are effectively saying that they really do believe at this point that there is some sort of collusion between media and government, and the press is not telling them the truth. This, too, is one of these areas where there had been this great hope I think that by creating a theoretically gatekeeper free media environment, we would create a flourishing new independent press that would enjoy the confidence and the trust of the public that was not subjected to the same incentives, and that we would have this rising trust in a burgeoning new media, and of course, that's not exactly what happens.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and you've argued then that in a world of new media propagandists, political news influencers who spread lies for a living, it's worth, I guess, considering that maybe Chomsky's model is out of date because perhaps the press just doesn't have the grip hold on information that we once thought it did.

Renée DiResta: Social media emerges long after Manufacturing Consent, and all of a sudden you have new gatekeepers and new incentives and new structures and new means of sharing information. You have the most empowered public you've ever had as far as the role that individual people can play in shaping public opinion and amplifying news that they like and sharing content with their friends. You have like a fundamental shift in who can be a content creator, who can tell stories.

In this particular case, we're talking about news influencers who have over a hundred thousand followers, and those followers play a very active role in amplifying them. I think a lot of people see influencers as these, like the sort of Pied Pipers, like leading around the masses, but that's not what's actually happening. The influencer maybe has more followers, but they're often pulling content up from posts that their followers are making as well.

Micah Loewinger: A couple weeks ago I had a piece about Joe Rogan, and at the end, I wrote a little bit about a Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker. It was interesting to me to then go to his stream and watch him listen to my piece on his stream about him. It had probably been fed to him by like his subreddit or maybe his Discord server, a place where his most devoted community members are almost like acting like a producer would for a radio or TV show, sort of giving him the material to talk about. It's like he's both the mouthpiece of a certain community, but he's also a part of a community.

Renée DiResta: That's a great example. A lot of the big podcasts actually have subreddits. I find them really interesting. You can see audience members in there both digesting and sometimes attacking and criticizing the podcasters. One of the interesting phenomenons in the influencer crowd relationship is this phenomenon called audience capture, where you'll occasionally see audiences begin to demand, why aren't you talking about this? That dynamic happened quite a lot in the days after October 7th. Why aren't you talking about Israel? Why aren't you talking about Palestine? Where people felt that they should be applying pressure to influencers who have reach, who can shape the discourse, who can shape political opinion.

The audience feels that the influencer should be using that power in a particular way, and it's really interesting to see those moments take shape because you realize this is not just a one-sided relationship. The influencer is absolutely dependent on the crowd being there. That's how they make their money, that's how they have their influence, that's how they have their reach, and so they don't want to do too much to alienate that crowd. Sometimes you'll see influencers becoming more and more ideological if their audience grows in a particular direction.

Micah Loewinger: This is just one incentive that is shaping some influencers to the point that they might become propagandists. What are some other incentives that are shaping this new media environment?

Renée DiResta: The ecosystem relies a lot on direct patronage. You see Substack writers making money directly from subscriptions themselves. That creates particular incentives in order to appeal to a group of people to gain your initial following. You're incentivized to appeal to a niche, right? To sort of start somewhere as a person who talks about a particular topic, and then to expand out from there.

You're incentivized to be entertaining, right? To be sensational, get as many engagements as possible, as many people engaging and reacting and commenting and paying attention to their content. This is an incredible challenge because you have to capture attention in an extraordinarily noisy, very, very fast-paced environment. The question of whether you should be relatable or authoritative, right?

A lot of people want influencers who very casually discuss the news of the day. Sometimes that means that there's going to be a lot that's wrong, unfortunately, or they're speculating, but they don't really have all of the facts yet, but that's what they're incentivized to do. Whereas mainstream media, because of the risk of things like lawsuits, is maybe not so incentivized to just publish whatever the latest rumor of the day is.

Micah Loewinger: You've observed how many online pundits and news influencers often present themselves as like the little guy, fighting against the big bad mainstream media, but that framing seems to make less and less sense every day, right?

Renée DiResta: It's marketing [laughs]. It's marketing. Look, Fox News established itself oppositionally, right? They over there are lying too. I am telling you the truth. If you think about it, positioning of niche media or a random Substack outlet or whatever as some sort of like de facto wholesome antithesis to the mainstream machine that's manufacturing consent over there in the corner.

It's a great David versus Goliath narrative, but it's ultimately a marketing ploy. Particularly because when you look at the amount of money in the influencer ecosystem, it can be absolutely staggering up at the top. I wonder about the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously saying, like, the media sucks and can't be trusted and also, we are the media now. You can't have it all the way.

Micah Loewinger: Which one is it? Choose a way.

Renée DiResta: Yes, I see it now as two distinct but overlapping ecosystems.

Micah Loewinger: Suspicion of the way that the old news model can be used for propaganda has been used by a new media environment to build up its influence, and audiences while itself being subject to a new set of incentives, that can also lead to the spread of propaganda, arguably on a larger scale than the legacy media ever could.

Renée DiResta: One thing that I find is as I engage with people who've read the book or read my essays, they actually didn't really understand how influencers got paid. In the realm of paid political content, which we haven't even talked about, influencers serving as the paid mouthpieces of political campaigns. The disclosures are incredibly opaque. Oftentimes you'll see a campaign contract with an agency. The agency subcontracts to the influencer. The campaign filing reports that contract with the agency doesn't say anything about the end-stage influencer.

That question of when they need need to disclose, particularly political speech is a little bit hazy. In 2022, Wired did this really interesting investigation into affiliate links using a very particular URL shortener that they found to be linked to a agency named Urban Legend. The people who were using this URL shortener, they spanned the political ecosystem, but ultimately that URL shortener was an indicator that the piece that they were posting, the content that they were posting, was tied to a particular paid campaign.

You had people like Donald Trump, Jr., Diamond and Silk, various real housewives, Olympic athletes, just all of these different people across the political spectrum who were participating in amplifying calls to sign petitions, calls to engage with political content. This influencer agency essentially had these clients who wanted to call attention to their various causes and things, and the agency helped broker these influencers for them, but there was no disclosure that was made in any of the posts.

Micah Loewinger: Certainly we can think of just how ripe this is for abuse by governments or other political purposes. On the Media is a media criticism show, and media can mean so many things. For most of the life of this show, it has really meant legacy press. Given that more influence, more discourse, shaping power is coming from a quickly changing influencer news ecosystem, how should On the Media approach this new era?

Renée DiResta: I think that we should be avoiding the reductive narratives that vilify or glamorize individual influencers, and instead focus on what they are as an ecosystem. A whole lot of early media focus and criticism of influencers focused on this individual's bad opinion, who that person was platforming, whether that person was a good person, and maybe there's room for that, but I think there's just a lot more criticism that could happen of this ecosystem at a much more structural, systematic level that recognizes the power that it has and the way that it intersects with the ecosystems of political power in this country, particularly over the next four years.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Renée, thanks so much.

Renée DiResta: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Renée DiResta is a researcher studying online manipulation, a professor at Georgetown University, and author of the book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how to make the truth go viral and when it seems too risky to try.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Before the break, we heard Renée DiResta discuss the system of incentives that prompt some news influencers to spread propaganda. Now let's turn to one content creator who's figured out how to make the truth go viral.

Hank Green: It's Brotherhood 2.0 with Hank and John Green.

Micah Loewinger: This is Hank Green filming himself as he sledded down a hill in 2007, very early days for YouTube. Along with his brother John Green, the famous novelist, the two helped popularize vlogging as a career. Over the last 17 years, Hank's become a sort of Bill Nye, the science guy for digital natives. His channels SciShow and Crash Course have 8 and 16 million subscribers, respectively. He's also got 8 million followers on TikTok, where he debunks bad info and answers the internet's questions about science and beyond with his characteristic blend of rigor and whimsy.

TikToker 1: "I'm allergic to seafood. Can I still scuba dive?"

Hank Green: I see we've returned to the eternal question of whether or not the ocean is a soup, and if it is a soup, it is obviously a seafood soup. If you are allergic to seafood, you should not have a seafood soup, but you can have ocean if you are allergic to seafood because there's not enough seafood in it to cause any kind of reaction. A person who is allergic to seafood can still have ocean.

Micah Loewinger: Yay, I called up Hank for a sense of what our fast moving, algorithmically driven information environment feels like to an influential content creator. I asked him what he knows about the internet now that he didn't know when he got started on YouTube in 2007.

Hank Green: Oh, the biggest thing I didn't know is how easily it could be used for evil, Micah. I really didn't expect that.

Micah Loewinger: It sure seems like the algorithms that govern platforms, they don't seem to really value truth.

Hank Green: How would you program that in? I mean, even if you wanted to.

Micah Loewinger: Exactly. They value attention.

Hank Green: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to influencers who've really hacked attention, who really understand virality, tell me a little bit about their tactics.

Hank Green: Like there's this great way to get people to pay attention to an item of news, which is to say, no one's talking about this. Why aren't they talking about this?

TikToker 2: "There are so many stories out there that the media is not covering. I left--"

TikToker 3: "I don't know how come nobody is talking about this drought that we're having. I'm in South."

TikToker 4: "Why is no one talking about Akon? He is building a city. I'm not. I'm not joking."

Micah Loewinger: Then you just like show yourself superimposed in a TikTok over a bunch of BBC News headlines.

Hank Green: You're like, oh yeah, they're talking about it. They're talking about it.

Micah Loewinger: You also want to have yourself on the screen with something visually interesting that is not you. Maybe a clip that doesn't really feel like it's related to the thing you're talking about, so that the person is confused a little bit. Confusion is a great emotion for an audience to be experiencing if you're trying to increase retention because if their curiosity is satisfied, they leave. Let's look at Dylan Page for a second.

Hank Green: Okay.

Micah Loewinger: He's the self-proclaimed top news influencer on TikTok. He has over 13 million followers. He calls himself News Daddy.

Hank Green: How old is Dylan Page? He looks like he's 18 years old.

Dylan Page: "Here's something no one's talking about. Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. The consequences of that is not just devastating."

Micah Loewinger: What's working for him?

Hank Green: It's like a billion little tricks. I use some of these tricks too. The main thing you have to be as a Dylan Page or as a Hank Green is really kind of obsessed with what makes the numbers go up. I see him in that way as a kindred spirit.

Micah Loewinger: His videos can have a sort of anti-institutionalist zing to them. Renée DiResta has called it the David versus Goliath trope.

Hank Green: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Me versus the mainstream media.

Hank Green: It is a great story. It's funny because I work inside of an institution that is very careful, like Crash Course and SciShow are both this way where they're careful, and they do a lot of primary research. I also do the other thing where it's just like me re-digesting existing reporting. They like and trust it more when it's just coming from me.

Micah Loewinger: The videos of just Hank speaking unscripted, they seem to do better?

Hank Green: Per unit of work, they do way better. I feel like it's easier to trust a human. You get to choose the exact person who has the worldview and the outlook, and makes the content that vibes with you best and has the face that vibes with you best and the voice that vibes with you best and the jokes that have the most relevance to your life.

Micah Loewinger: You're kind of describing the parasocial relationship.

Hank Green: Yes. I think that if it's treated respectfully and if you sort of understand the responsibility that comes along with that, that's not necessarily a terrible thing.

Micah Loewinger: Walk me through how you play the game while still living up to your values, like, give me a little sense of the thought process.

Hank Green: One thing that has worked well for me is actually taking people on the journey.

Micah Loewinger: Give me an example of a time where you felt like the process was really genuinely captured.

Hank Green: I had this thought while I was picking up my son at school, that all the fancy pants parents, their cars looked weird. Instead of looking like regular car colors, they looked like mud. I just sat down at my computer and I was like, why do cars look like putty now? I recorded my screen and I recorded my video, and I went down the path of reading original journalism from people who had interviewed car color specialists. I went and found out the original color that this started with.

The growing trend of flat gray cars started with Nardo Grey by Audi. All right, should have gone to the second comment.

This is three years ago, by the way. Nardo Grey, Audi's classic gray color. Nardo love that. That was just like a really authentic, like, come with me on a journey as I discover like weird things about the world. It's very low stakes, because if I get it wrong, nobody's going to like take the wrong medicine.

Micah Loewinger: The stakes are low, but what I do love about it is intentional or not, and you can tell me you are teaching media literacy. You're showing like people trust you and you're showing them how you find good information. I was really impressed with your one about the myth that we all eat a credit card's worth of plastic every week.

Hank Green: Oh, yes, this was a while ago.

Micah Loewinger: Because this was not just some goofball internet thing. This was reported by a lot of mainstream outlets, right?

Hank Green: There was a bunch of different analyses that looked at different sources where you might get plastics from. Then if you add up the top range of every one of those sources, it turns out it's a very large number, but then that number got worked into a peer reviewed article as a background stat. What then happened is the press people at that university looked for the most interesting piece of information in that paper, which, of course was the fact that we eat a credit card's worth of plastic every week, which is not true.

They pulled that and they put it in the press release, and then that got put into a bunch of different articles. It was such a useful thing for getting people to click on things that that quickly spread from, like, less credible outlets to more credible outlets. Because all you had to do was go and look at the source, which was a peer reviewed article that did contain the stat.

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't some big conspiracy theory. There was no foul play. It's just sloppiness laundered from source to source.

Hank Green: It does make me ask, does that sound right to you? A week, I feel like our food would be harder to eat.

Micah Loewinger: Or our stomachs would be filled with many credit cards worth of plastic.

[laughter]

Hank Green: That's it. That's sort of where I started from, as I was like, that sounds wrong, but where your flag gets raised is going to be different for every person. It's going to be based on your worldview. If you only fact check facts that sound wrong, you're going to be missing all the ones that sound right that are nonetheless wrong.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, everyone makes mistakes. One thing that I think you do really well, though, is that you do more than own up to an error. You turn it into an event of sorts.

Hank Green: Yes. People love an "I was wrong" video. I love views. This is what my entire business is based on. It is important to me. We were wrong about avocados.

Micah Loewinger: You had made a video that included what you later learned was a myth that avocados exist in the form we know them today, thanks to an extinct creature called the giant ground sloth.

Hank Green: Yes. Fruits mostly exist for seed dispersal reasons. You eat the fruit and then you poop the seeds out somewhere else, and then they get to travel farther away from their home tree. Well, who the heck was eating an avocado and swallowing that pit? It certainly was not something the size of a human. The theory, and this was published in a paper. It was just an idea. It was that there was these giant ground sloths, and then, like, this became a great fact.

Micah Loewinger: This is like a dinner table conversation.

Hank Green: Yes. The biggest bias in media is toward a cool story. We are not lefty righty. It's like, what's interesting, probably avocados have weirdly big pits because people bred avocados to be big and the pit got big along with the avocado.

Micah Loewinger: Boring.

Hank Green: Yes, so we got to make a video that was like, we were wrong about avocados.

"Here at SciShow, we take accuracy really seriously. Our last video on this subject relied on some sources that, as we described, were a little flimsy for the arguments we made. Because of this, we have unlisted that video. As always, we are here to spread ideas supported by evidence and science, not myths, but we are never, of course, above spreading some avocados on our toast."

It was the most popular video that month.

Micah Loewinger: Making corrections, of course, is a long practice of the legacy media. I get the sense it's not always the practice of content creators. Yet, according to Gallup, Americans continue to register record low trust in legacy media. You really think a lot about maintaining trust with your viewers.

Hank Green: I worry about it all the time. It's probably my biggest worry as an individual content creator. I have, like, bigger worries as a business owner of trying to keep people employed and stuff. Like, if people lose trust in SciShow, that impacts the bottom line. As a person, I got into YouTube because I like to be liked. I desperately don't want to become another story of, like, somebody I thought was good but turned out to be bad, and sometimes I have no control over that. You're allowed to, like, in private, hate me. I remember how much my friends hated Dave Matthews Band in high school, and that was part of our identity. Dave Matthews did nothing wrong.

Micah Loewinger: Dudes love to hate a band. I mean, that's just--

Hank Green: That's absolutely.

Micah Loewinger: It's our rights.

[laughter]

Hank Green: If there are reasons that that's happening that are my failings, I do want to know about it. People have so many reasons to lose trust in the world right now, and I don't want to be a part of that.

Micah Loewinger: You've said that you're careful about taking on hot button issues, but aren't the hot button issues the most important for someone like you to weigh in on?

Hank Green: Oh, boy.

Micah Loewinger: How do you make that calculation? Weighing this precious trust that you're trying to protect while also serving your audience?

Hank Green: Yes, I think you are right to put your finger on this. This is a really interesting thing. There are certain things that I feel like, literally I do not have the expertise to take on, but there's more to it than that. Two, there are issues that I do understand pretty well that I don't talk that much about.

I can be like, well, some of my audience is going to be really big Elon Musk fans, and some of them are going to be really big Elon Musk haters. I know where I am on that, but I'd rather not alienate the Musk fans and I'd rather not alienate the Musk haters. Like when that fricking spaceship got caught by that tower, that was amazing. I was a little bit publicly amazed, but I can make the choice because I'm trying to preserve that trust, and because I'm trying to preserve my sanity. I don't want to be in fights on the internet all the time. I can make the choice to just not engage with certain topics, and that is not a choice that I feel like you, for example, have.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and that's what I'm concerned about. Because if you, as one of our highest integrity content creators feel like there are certain topics that you can't talk about because it would negatively impact your business, what does that mean about a future where more and more content creators are taking the place of what journalism and legacy media used to serve?

Hank Green: I hadn't actually thought about this, but it is another way, and it's not the only way that this transition is not great for actual information environment.

Micah Loewinger: I guess what I'm wondering is, like, if it's possible to maintain the broad trust you have to reach a really large, diverse audience, which I sense you do, while charging headfirst into topics that inevitably upset and alienate some viewers, like, is it an either or proposition?

Hank Green: Yes. I feel this way even when it comes to, like, my position on who to vote for in the election. I don't want to alienate Trump voters from science. If you don't feel like you can be comfortable in the space of SciShow, then, like, where are you going to get your good information? We go into controversial stuff when it is connected to science, but I don't, because I'm like, me, and I'm like, trying to do what's fun and interesting to my audience. I don't know that people get that distinction. It's really troubling. Like, one of the reasons that SciShow has lost a lot of trust with that kind of audience is because we use gender-inclusive language.

Micah Loewinger: When you say gender-inclusive language, like--

Hank Green: Instead of saying women who menstruate, you would say people who menstruate, which also is, for clarity, more inclusive, broadly, because there are lots of women who don't menstruate, and we've been very open about why we do that and about why we think that is the correct choice. People lose focus on what you're saying, and they're like, oh my God, this is woke. I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to lose those people, but I also, like, there's no reason to not use gender-inclusive language.

Micah Loewinger: Your audience, it seems, really wants you to explain everything to them because you're good at it and you explain a lot of things, but that's a lot of pressure. It seems that it's kind of a pressure that's much more easily borne by a news organization than just one guy.

Hank Green: Yes, I would absolutely go insane if I thought I had to explain everything, but what I want to do is I want to help people understand how weird and cool and interdependent their world is. What I really want is for people to believe that humans are good. This line of work has brought to me a real deep appreciation and fascination with humanity that I really do want to share because I don't think that we have great systems for meaning making right now. If we discard the feeling that humans are cool or good, then we got nothing. It's very easy to think about murder and be like man's inhumanity toward man, but very hard to think about like jazz or love, and like, tell me a species that has ever thought about a future generation that isn't a human?

Micah Loewinger: I can't think of one.

Hank Green: If you gave raccoons this much power, they'd [beep] it up faster than us. I guarantee you.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Hank, thank you so much.

Hank Green: Thank you. I love this show.

Micah Loewinger: Hank Green hosts the educational YouTube channels Crash Course and SciShow. You can find him on most platforms at Hank Green.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, some tech titans seem eager to run away from the world they helped create.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its sixth test of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket. The same rocket he hopes to send to Mars one day to fulfill his long time goal of building a colony off world.

Elon Musk: "That's the overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet--Mars is the only option really--and to do so ideally before World War III or some kind of that thing."

Brooke Gladstone: In Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged, the rich and the talented, fed up with government constraints on their free will, abandon America for a utopia and leave the rest of us to perish in our own mediocrity. Douglas Rushkoff has written many books about the philosophy, culture and evolution of life online. For as long as there's been one. His latest Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires opens in a remote desert where he meets five unnamed tech titans who want him to assess their strategies for surviving what they call the event.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right, that's the lingo, the word they use to describe the apocalypse or climate catastrophe or pandemic that wipes out humanity.

Brooke Gladstone: There are actual places. A safe haven project in Princeton, an ultra elite shelter in the Czech Republic.

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the worst ones are where they build a fortress and surround it with kerosene filled lakes that they can light on fire as the masses storm their gates for food. Armed with Navy Seals protecting their organic permaculture farms. Mark Zuckerberg has a rather impenetrable estate out in Hawaii. Peter Thiel has been building something in New Zealand. One of the guys pulled out these plans he had for these shipping containers and bury them underground and connect them all with tubes. If you end up with eight or 10 or 15 shipping containers, you can have a big underground apartment. One of them had an indoor pool.

I asked him, I said, so my neighbor's always got these trucks in front of his house, bringing replacement parts. What are you going to do for replacement parts in your heated pool, once there's no pool places? He pulls out this little moleskin book and he writes down there, new parts for pool. What I realized is these guys are thinking just one level into the science fiction fantasy, but then when you push on it just a little bit, they're not thinking about it at all.

Brooke Gladstone: As a practical matter, you did debunk their plans because it's impossible to ensure survival amid global catastrophe. You say fundamentally that's not what they really wanted from you.

Douglas Rushkoff: I think what they really wanted was for me to water test their survival strategies. Will this work? Will that work? Should I go to Alaska? Should I go to New Zealand? While I don't know whether Alaska or New Zealand will fare better, I do know something about what's driving these people. There in the moment, I felt a little bit more like an intellectual dominatrix. They hired me to make fun of what they were doing, to pull the rug out, or at worst to make them suffer, make them feel guilty for wanting to move on and leave the rest of us behind.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, in the book you describe them as kind of self-styled Übermenschen who believes in scientism, that human beings can be reduced to their chemical components and that's it, and only the truly superior understand that.

Douglas Rushkoff: Mark Zuckerberg, he models himself after Augustus Caesar. Elon Musk sees himself as one of the Avengers, as Iron Man. They see themselves as demigods living, as Peter Thiel would say, one level above the rest of us, one order of magnitude above humans.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us, I guess, to the core idea of your book, what you call the mindset.

Douglas Rushkoff: When I was introduced to the internet, it was through the California counterculture. We thought we were going to give people these tools and increase the creativity of the collective human imagination. It was that wonderful psychedelic hippie rave. Along came Wired magazine and investors who decided, oh, no, rather than give people the tools to create a new reality, let's use these technologies on people in order to make them more predictable. Instead of giving people tools, we use tools on people. For years, I blame this on capitalism, and it's easy because there's a lot we can blame on it.

As I met more of these people, I realized it was really intrinsic to their techno, pseudo-scientific mindset. If all we are is information, all we are is DNA, that's all that matters. It dovetails perfectly with corporate capitalism, because capitalism, it's just the numbers. Ray Kurzweil, one of the technologists at Google, really believes he can upload his consciousness to a computer and move on because it's just data.

Brooke Gladstone: I was kind of moved by your discussion with Ray Kurzweil. You made an impassioned argument for what you call the squishy stuff and its unquantifiable value in human experience. He just called that noise.

Douglas Rushkoff: I know, wasn't that odd? He said, "Oh, Rushkoff, you're just saying that because you're human," as if it was hubris. Digital technologists, they understand all the little quantized notches, but anything that's not on that line is noise. That's why the aesthetic of the digital age is auto-tuning. You get that note exactly right. I understand maybe with a commercial artist like an Ariana Grande, you make a better recording by auto-tuning on that 440Hz A note.

What if you auto-tune James Brown? When James Brown's reaching up for that note, it's that reaching up that the technologist considers noise, because it's not on the note. You and I understand that reaching, that's the true signal. That's the human being speaking through the music to us. It's the way we don't conform rather than the way we do. It's the soft, squishy stuff.

That's what they don't understand. That's their fear. I realized this as I was writing this book that these escape plans they have, they want to leave behind this weird, squishy, female, natural in-between liminal world that's so confusing. It doesn't have numbers. They want to rise above this dirty, fertile matter, and experience themselves as pure consciousness, just ones and zeros where everything just makes sense.

Brooke Gladstone: You were writing this book back in 2022, but now with Trump's re-ascension to the White House, do you feel that the Tech Bros ideas have gotten a big boost?

Douglas Rushkoff: It's strange. A lot of people with authoritarian ambitions have quoted my work. The Prime Minister of Italy was talking about Team Human. This book I wrote, really arguing for the human against this mechanistic understanding of the world. The far right grabbed onto that slogan. Steve Bannon read out loud 5 or 10 pages of Team Human.

Brooke Gladstone: What did he like about it?

Douglas Rushkoff: It was interesting. Bannon and Meloni--

Brooke Gladstone: Giorgia Meloni, Italy's far-right PM.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes, they see the Team Human revolt as taking a stand against the technocracy, that kind of Obama-Hillary reduction of our world by the technocrats. Now we see the right wing embracing the technocrats. Musk and other Silicon Valley demigods flipped in some ways from being part of the left to being part of the right. That's because they don't have political ideology. They just want to side with whoever's going to support their techno-dominating understanding of the world, their notions of progress and conquest. Because in the end, what we're looking at really is a continuation of the colonial urge by digital means. They've run out of physical territory. What do you take over? You take over the information space.

Brooke Gladstone: They sure have, but speaking purely of technology, you argue that even the philanthrocapitalists or the green technologists, they really have nothing for us.

Douglas Rushkoff: Even the most well-meaning technologists who are talking about doing humane technology, they're still ass backwards in their perspective. Oh, we can create humane technologies that undo the effects of these bad technologies. If you're using your smartphone too much and getting anxiety, we'll create a wellness app to undo the effects of the bad apps. The solution always involves more technology or, oh, we've destroyed the planet with all this, so now we're going to build high-tech ecovillages run with sensors and AI that maximize the soil efficiency. Then whatever technological invention they've come up with becomes enslaved by the market. It has to now grow exponentially in order to even stay in business. All of these technologies are not really in service of humanity. They're still in service of these abstract financial markets.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that the tech titans, when they move fast and when they break things, they do it so they're not hit by falling debris. That the race to space or wealth or personal sovereignty is less running toward a vision than it is trying to run away from the resentment and the damage they're causing. You compare them a bit to Wily Coyote. In the famous cartoon, he's always devising extravagant ways to ensnare his enemy, the roadrunner. Then he becomes the victim of his own invention, ends up out there in midair, looks down and goes down. You say the tech titans are going down.

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the reason they're going down and their own fear are two different things. Their fear has been fueling them from the beginning. They're afraid of women. They're afraid of nature. They're less afraid of death than they are of life and complexity.

Brooke Gladstone: Now that's a hell of a harsh assessment.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Tech Bros are deeply afraid of the very technologies they've made. They're afraid of AI because they think AI is going to do to them what they've been doing to us.

Brooke Gladstone: Got any proof for that assertion?

Douglas Rushkoff: They are the ones who are starting the big organizations and companies to prevent AI's domination. They think that there's a 50% chance or 20% chance or 90% chance that AI will lead to the end of the world because AI will decide that human beings are unnecessary.

Brooke Gladstone: Some have suggested that's just a ruse so that Congress will hold the experts even closer because we need them so desperately to survive.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. The most earnest among them actually either believe what they're saying or believe that they need to bring in government and regulation in order to help develop AI. The more cynical way of understanding it is they want regulation so that they can preserve their monopolies. The minute you bring in regulators, the biggest players at the table win. Another cynical response is that they're just trying to sell a technology that isn't really so special anyway. These are just algorithms that if you talk about them as, oh, these could end reality itself, then it seems important.

Brooke Gladstone: Either way, you really think they're going down.

Douglas Rushkoff: Either the Tech Bros will go down or we all go down. This is not a way to sustain a civilization. Each time you turn the wheel of accelerationist capitalism, you have to pull that much more out of the planet every week. It goes back to why we can't just replace all of our oil cars with electric cars overnight. Where do you get the molybdenum? Where do you get the cobalt? The amount of mining we would have to do to get the rare earth metals to feed the laws of physics.

You can't keep growing. There is a fixed reality in which we live. The saddest part is the human project, the natural project, the species on the planet don't need economic growth, only this operating system needs economic growth. These Tech Bros, rather than questioning that basic economic operating system, they are addicted to it, stuck in it, and they're willing to do whatever they can to keep growing that thing.

Brooke Gladstone: These guys have a doomsday plan which you think can't work, do you?

Douglas Rushkoff: I'd argue that the way to prepare for the event or to prevent the event are the very same things. Mutual aid, localism, meeting your neighbors, not being afraid of them. The story that I've been telling lately is when I had to hang a picture of my daughter after she graduated high school, I didn't have a drill. The first thing I thought to do, like any Tech Bro, is go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product drill, use it once, stick it in the garage, and probably never use it again. Or if I do, I'm going to take it out in two years, it's not going to recharge, and I'm going to throw it out, or I can walk down the street to Bob's house and say, "Bob, can I borrow your drill?"

How have we, through digital technology, become so dissocialized that we're afraid to ask our neighbor for a favor? Because what's going to happen? I'm going to borrow the drill from Bob, and then Bob is going to see me having a barbecue the next weekend and wonder, hey, Doug should invite me over for that barbecue because I just lent him my drill. Then I invite Bob over and the other neighbors are going to smell the barbecue and think, why aren't we over there? Then before long, we're going to have a party with the whole block, and that's the nightmare.

That's what the technologists are building their bunkers for. It's to get away from us, and America, humanity, all of our natural resources, we're just the first stage on the rocket, the disposable stage that they can jettison once they've made it to the next level. I promise you, they're not going to make it. There is no next level. This is it.

Brooke Gladstone: Doug, thanks so much.

Douglas Rushkoff: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Douglas Rushkoff is a professor at the City University of New York of Digital Economics and Media, and his latest book is called Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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