Oscillations

A central throughline at OSCILLATIONS is humans’ coevolution with technology. In our interview with Dr. Judy Fan, we talked about how human inventions like drawing and writing serve as cognitive technologies that allow us to jointly attend to the same ideas across space and time. These ancient cognitive technologies paved the way for our inventions of modern technologies, which are now having a disproportionate effect on our collective attention. Building upon these ideas, in our last interview with Tim Hwang, we learned about how one modern technology in particular, programmatic ad markets, determine what we’re exposed to, how we create content, and even the ways we converge - or fail to converge - on shared values.

Today we’re going to dig deeper into the relationship between attention and values. We’re searching for something that’s harder to grasp than the broken mechanisms of the digital ad economy. We’re going to reflect on the concept of “value” in both an economic and a social sense.

Today we’re talking to Joe Marchese... For an investor, Joe has some contrarian ideas about curation, attention, and the mass amateurization of content. These ideas will be the focus of our conversation today. Let’s dive in.
"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
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In our last episode, we talked about cognitive technologies, or behaviors that shape our capacities to think, communicate, and imagine. Cultural artifacts like language, visual drawings, math, and art are cognitive technologies because they allow us to link our minds together and invent new ideas that go beyond what any one mind could do on its own. They allow us to stabilize and share ideas across space and time to build increasingly complex tools, systems, and societies.

Today, humans are at a point in society where we’re creating things that we don't understand. A few decades ago, it was said we’d reached a point where no one individual could understand things we were starting to build, such as how computers work. Instead, it took a group of specialized experts to jointly piece together new technologies we were inventing. In the past few years, with increasingly complex artificial intelligence technologies, we’ve crossed another threshold: we’ve built things that nobody can fully understand - not even groups of experts.

Unlocking this Pandora's box has created a positive feedback loop: In order to coordinate the collective interactions of new, complicated technologies, we must develop even more complicated systems. Ironically, many of the technologies are intended to simplify our lives - to allow us to more easily connect with one another, manage our finances, and order our groceries. But the speed at which new technologies are evolving in fact further complicates our lives. This is one of the major paradoxes of the 21st Century. (“Hashtag disruption!”)

Today we’re talking with Tim Hwang about one of the most pervasive examples of these technologies. It’s the one that underlies the entire business model of the internet. And it’s having a profound effect on human behavior at a global scale. We’re talking about programmatic advertising.

Tim is a writer, researcher, and currently the general counsel at Substack. He’s the author of The Subprime Attention Crisis , a book about the online advertising bubble that we’ll be discussing today. He’s also a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a board member of Meedan, a non-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information. Previously he’s served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google, as well as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest.

The ideas we’ll cover are a bit jargonized and technical, but their implications are extremely broad and important. Tim believes we’re in danger of another economic collapse, perhaps even orders of magnitude larger than the 2008 mortgage crisis.

Given the technical nature of the topic, we’re going to first review the main arguments in Tim’s book and then ask him to connect his ideas to the themes we think about at Oscillations. We encourage our listeners to read The Subprime Attention Crisis, since there’s a lot of information that we won’t be able to cover in our conversation today.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
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In the modern world, technology is all around us. It’s hard to imagine a life without our phones, our cars, and our apps. When we think about what technology is , we typically think about physical inventions, like lightbulbs, steam engines, and laptops, along with the algorithms these machines run on. Most people would agree that technology, broadly speaking, refers to the tools we invent to solve problems and simplify things. Moreover, many would also acknowledge that these tools often create new problems and complicate things. For example, the internet has given us unprecedented access to information... but it has also accelerated the spread of misinformation. This means that we have to invent new technologies to manage the old ones. Within this cycle, we culturally co-evolve with our technologies.

When we think about technologies as culture-shaping tools with which we co-evolve generally , rather than hardware and software specifically , it becomes clear that many things can count as “technologies.”

Those of you who’ve listened to previous podcasts know that my research focuses on language evolution. When I was making the transition from academia to tech, I had to give a talk as part of the interview process at Google. So I gave my dissertation talk, and in it I described language as the “original technology” that defined homo sapiens. My interviewers found this very strange. They were used to thinking about technology in terms of the products they were building.

Fundamentally, however, language is a technology - and it’s one that set humans off on their current evolutionary trajectory.

At Oscillations, we focus on technology, art, culture, and the science of the mind. All of these things come together in what psychology Professor Judy Fan, Director of the Cognitive Tools Lab at UC San Diego, calls “cognitive technologies.” Cognitive technologies are behaviors that shape our capacities to think, communicate, and imagine. I met Professor Fan earlier this year at a month-long conference called the “Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute,” or “DISI” for short. As the name implies, every summer the institute brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on some aspect of intelligence. There are cognitive scientists, like Judy and myself, philosophers, biologists, neuroscientists, artificial intelligence researchers, political scientists, and even writers and artists. DISI also puts out a fantastic podcast called the Many Minds podcast, which you should definitely check out if you’re into the science of the mind.

Today we’re talking with Professor Fan about some of her recent research, which integrates methods from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and AI, to investigate how humans learn and link their minds together. This research has implications for understanding our cultural co-evolution with technology, our strategies for establishing common ground, and our predisposition to create art.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
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Grace is a way of making others feel at ease. Like hospitality, good manners, cultivating a sense of fashion, and putting your best foot forward when it counts, grace is an ongoing effort and cultivated habit of making the world less stressful and more pleasing for those around us.

For these reasons, grace is something like a virtue or a paramount “first principle” of social interaction. In this sense, grace is a courtesy; a respect for others. Grace reflects an awareness of being situated in something larger than ourselves, whether that’s a relationship, a community, or a society.

Yet grace is overlooked. In my own lifetime, it seems to have eroded considerably. I remember fondly back to my childhood, a time when nobody received calls after 7pm - a social convention that respected family and personal time and recognized a need to collect oneself, move at a slower pace, and wind down for the day. I remember a time when politicians showed at least some deference to decorum, especially a head of state. I even grew up in a small town in the foothills of Berkshires where vestigial organs of a bygone etiquette would make the occasional appearance: antique ideas that children might refer to their parents and grandparents by “sir” and “maam,” that one ought to ask to be excused from the table, or that any plateware left behind by a guest ought not be returned to them empty.

Grace is an outward orientation, and as such it’s a bit anemic in a modern culture with such inward-oriented messaging that encourages us to prioritize our own happiness, our own boundaries, our self care, our self expression, our feelings, our self-reliance, and our independence.

To try and understand what grace is and where it fits into modern life, we’re speaking today with Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and dance critic at the Washington Post. I read her book “The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life” years ago and it’s had a lasting impact on me. It takes the reader on a search for grace, occasionally looking at some pretty surprising and educative examples. It’s not only a pleasure to read, it’s an inspirational call to action.

At OSCILLATIONS we’re all about the inspirational and the visionary - the imagining of new, more creative and beautiful worlds. The book gently encourages us to imagine a world where we are generally better to each other and collectively contributing to a sort of beautification project. For most of us, life is hard enough without having to suffer through its trials surrounded by slumped shoulders, shuffling feet, and morose dispositions. I came away from the book with a strong desire to fashion myself into a graceful person as a matter of virtue and civic responsibility. Let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

We couldn’t be more honored and excited to speak with Sarah about grace, culture, art, dance, civics, and science. And so with that, we bring you Sarah Kaufman.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
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Art and entertainment play a central role in culture, shaping our preferences, attitudes, and values, and creating a sense of shared cultural identity. In the 21st century, new technological platforms have not only changed the way we consume art and entertainment, but they’ve also led to new genres of content and paved new pathways for creators. There’s been an explosion of new forms of expression, communication, storytelling, and connecting with others around the world.

At OSCILLATIONS, we’re interested in understanding these cultural changes and how we can leverage them to amplify creative expression and cross-cultural collaborations. On this front, there’s perhaps no better role model to look to than Brad Haugen, President of Westbrook Media at Westbrook.

We’ve all seen Will Smith and his family’s incredible adaptation to the new ways of doing media and entertainment in the digital and social technology age. Westbrook exemplifies several emerging trends, where celebrities are leveraging their brands in new, socially progressive ways. They’re working to reach younger audiences, who engage with content very differently. They’re partnering with other organizations in the Smith Family circle to make and promote socially impactful investments in startups. And they’re experimenting with categorically new kinds of storytelling at a time when Hollywood—and our increasingly interconnected world, more broadly—is undergoing rapid transitions and associated growing pains.

Westbrook’s mission is to empower artists to tell stories that connect the world. If you’ve read the OSCILLATIONS manifesto or listened to us read it on the first three episodes of our podcast, you might have noticed the alignment. At OSCILLATIONS, we’re all about empowering artists to guide the future of some of the most exciting—but also potentially scary—creative technologies that will be coming out in the next decade or two.

One of the reasons we’re so excited to talk with Brad is that he himself is a talented visual artist. You can see his paintings on his Instagram profile, and more recently showcased at art galleries. It’s extraordinarily rare to find such dedicated, technically proficient, and talented artists working on the business and entrepreneurial side of any industry. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to get Brad’s thoughts on how entertainment is changing, how the attention economy can be used for social good, and how artists might tangibly shape the future by spreading their art and ideas in a rapidly changing world.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills
Join the movement from the very beginning. If you believe that #thefutureiscreative, support us with a like, a follow, and a share.
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