Attentionalism, Censorship, and Expanding Your Mind with Alexander Bard, Writer & Philosopher

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Alexander, philosopher and author, and they discuss how consumer attention has become society's new currency, why the moderators of any social network need to be highly qualified and highly paid, and why it's important to constantly expose yourself to different views and challenge your beliefs. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Alexander Bard at 00:00:34) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. And so your transition from music to this YouTube universe, is that what got you involved with the concept of big tech censorship?

(Alexander Bard at 00:00:57) No, it was earlier than that. This is more like, this is the last five to ten years we're talking about where the format has changed. I was in television for many years before that. I did all the big shows like Swedish Idol, Sweden's Got Talent, TV shows like that. Because obviously I was in the music industry for twenty-five years. I had four different bands. They were internationally successful. I also produced records that were huge hits in the States, so I had great success. I was very, very lucky. But what happened was that when I was working with music in the late nineteen nineties, I discovered that the Internet was a fascinating phenomenon itself. And I always dreamed about maybe one day becoming a philosopher or writing a book. And it turns out that I'm working on my sixth or my seventh book at the moment, that I've become an established international philosopher. So it was a gradual shift. I call it the secondary and the primary archetype. It turned out that my secondary archetype was a music producer and a songwriter, and my primary archetype was to become a philosopher one day. And again, I was lucky. I had great mentors. I was invested in early. I had the right connections. So when my first book was published twenty-two years ago, another journey started in my life, and that's the journey of being a philosopher. And of course, because I came from a technological revolution in music—I came from the revolution where we moved from acoustic to electronic—I was one of the pioneering producers who fired the musicians, got myself computers and technicians, and started making music in a whole new way in Scandinavia in the late nineteen eighties. And because I knew what it meant and how technology could change your life forever, I got interested in technology. And it turned out very few philosophers had actually dealt with the relationship between human beings and technology. And I was completely, you know, that's my thing. That's what I'm gonna do. I practiced it. I've learned it through a trade for twenty-five years. I can now start expressing my own ideas in the relationship between human beings and technology. That's what I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) Who are your peers as far as modern-day philosophers in this technology space?

(Alexander Bard at 00:02:58) Well, it's both a timeless aspect of philosophy, and my two huge heroes are Hegel and Nietzsche. They were both Germans. They were in the nineteenth century, and basically they formulated what we call the modern society, but they're gold mines. There's much more to them than that. And you could always try to imagine, what would Hegel have said? What would Nietzsche have said? What would Freud have said? What would Marx have said about something when you study it? So you can both go to the timeless world of philosophy and basically try to think like those guys thought. But then there are the guys who are much closer in time to us. And huge inspiration for me was Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cyberneticist and theorist on media and his media theories. And he also had this sort of what's called an Aristotelian approach. Like Aristotle always told Plato, you can have your great ideas in your head, but I'm working in the real world where people are connected with things. So I like this idea of working with contextuality. Like, what is your environment? Where are you located? What kind of machines do you use? How does a laptop screen affect you? How does smartphone communication affect you? How does data storage and data processing affect you and your life? All those things are the ones that fascinate me. I think human beings are usually pretty similar over time. We haven't changed much in the last five thousand years or so. We still sleep with the wrong person and have terrible babies, basically. But our technological environment is actually what is different over time, and our entire concept of civilization is built on technology, most of all on information and communication technology. All of civilization always was. So the arrival of the Internet only makes it even more abundantly clear to us that we need to understand the environments in which we're located to understand ourselves. And here, many Americans like Marshall McLuhan contributed a lot to that research, and they were great inspirations for me when I got started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:58) So there's a lot to unpack there, but the way I found you was—I had my team, I said, look, we were trying to cover this topic of big tech censorship, right? Because there's a lot of tough questions there. A lot of the questions often lead to more philosophical conversations, right? Like, should it be a hundred percent open and free? The moment it's not a hundred percent open and free, there's some arbiters of who decides what it is. Who are those people? Are they, you know, all of these questions come up. And I was trying to have these conversations. I found out real quick I can't have them with people who are Fortune 500 executives that work at big tech companies because that's not exactly the conversations that they wanna have. And then I talked to a couple other people who we weren't able to necessarily air the interviews because they just went extremely political. Like, every question I asked, it ended in a political concept, and I just was like, there's so much division right now. I'm focused personally on where's the parts that we agree on and how can we be objective and think about things rationally versus championing one side over another. So I've struggled. That's what I'm trying to get across to you. I've struggled trying to get this topic of big tech censorship covered, and my team approached me and they said, we've got this guy Alexander, we think he might be able to do it. And so I was like, okay, cool. So I'm gonna give you a blanket question here and I'm just curious. What are your general thoughts on what's happening today with big tech censorship?

(Alexander Bard at 00:06:32) I always go to the user. I always go to the customer straight away. Any company I work with, any kind of business I work with, I go straight to the customer, the user. And we're all customers and we're all users. So for example, somebody wants to send a newsletter from a corporation. I look through the newsletter. I discover it's just full of clichés and bombastic statements, and I would throw it in the spam box if I got it. So I just asked them, if you weren't working for this company and you got this newsletter from somebody else, what would you do with it? And they go pale. I'd throw it in the spam box. And then I just say, well, what do you think other people will do? And I said, rip it apart, throw it away. You can't communicate that way any longer. You gotta figure out other ways to communicate, if you can communicate at all. You must humbly accept that you might not be in a position where it's possible for you to communicate. You might have to work on your act. You might have to work on your product or your service much more before it's actually ready to be communicated so that people gladly, willingly spread information about it. So it's always good to go back to yourself. So for example, we hear the question about, I've got my data. And we're trained to think about ourselves as individuals. Like, it's my data, I own it. Well, data doesn't operate that way. Data is not like money. Data does not lose its value if it's distributed. It can be shared. It can be shared with many people. So better approach to think, so you got your data, and say you could control it, and there was just one guy in the room, maybe Xi Jinping of communist China, right? Because the Chinese Communist Party steals all the information in all computers in China and stores it in a central Communist Party computer. Now we don't want that, do we? No, we don't. Morally, maybe it's wrong, but more than anything, it's not resilient. Because once you allow one guy at the top to run everything, then we know what dictators are like. You know, you have a virus spreading in the community, doesn't matter where it started, but the dictator's not gonna be told until six or seven months into the whole process because nobody dares to tell them the truth. And then he starts acting on it, and then you get a worldwide pandemic. That's a perfect example. The problem with China was not whether it started in a lab or in a wet market or whatever. The problem was that the dictator of China didn't know until six or seven months after the whole pandemic got started. And that's the problem with dictatorship internally. The problem is nobody wants to talk to the guy who talks. We got Putin at the moment. Putin clearly doesn't know in Russia what's going on in Ukraine. He's wildly guessing. He's been told tons of stuff about his army, and it turns out his entire army is built on corrupt steel. Corrupt steel, right? Like, the steel is not the steel that's supposed to be in the tanks, and he's losing a war in Ukraine because of it. That to me speaks volumes about why power concentration is so dangerous. And our sort of aggressive reaction against big tech when they don't get this is because of this, because the system itself will not be resilient if these guys rule the roost. So the trick is this: if you give your information to just one guy, you won't let him have it. But if you can give your information to, say, five guys that are competing with each other to provide you with great services, that's a whole different story. And I think the trick here is to go back to the U.S. Constitution. As a philosopher, I'm endlessly fascinated with the principle of power sharing, because if you have at least three different powers to keep each other in checks and balances, that's a much more stable system over time than just having one little Stalin guy at the top. And the same thing goes for the corporate world. The corporate world goes corrupt, it becomes lazy, it makes its money when it becomes a monopoly. We have no use for that as customers and users. But we have every use in the world for providing the data, keeping the data open, giving the data to the tech companies so the tech companies can create great services for all of us. That's a whole different ballgame.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) I knew if I talked to a philosopher, my mind would run. I think about this stuff a lot, and you're giving me a lot of unique content, I guess. I'm getting a lot of, your examples and references are not things that I've heard regurgitated a lot. So if I'm paused a little bit, it's because I'm taking in a lot of new information.

(Alexander Bard at 00:10:48) We can go back to the censorship question because it follows from this. It's just like when you move into the customer-user mode and you stay there, then you don't want censorship, of course, right? But you want information that's valid to you. And the trick for that is called algorithms. And the problem with the algorithms at the moment is that they were actually better fifty years ago than they are now. Say Google in 2008—their algorithms were basically clean, as we call them now. They were free and open, meaning that they reflected you as the user. So say putting yourself in front of a laptop or a smartphone and you search. We all search these days. We use the algorithms to search because otherwise the Internet would be nothing but a huge chaos. But the algorithms provide us with order. So they tip us, go here, go there. This is usually the global algorithm, meaning you look for a restaurant, this is the best restaurant in the world for you. Then it's a local algorithm. It says this is the best restaurant for you where you live or where you're based at the moment. Do you want us to book a table? Right? That's fantastic. The algorithms are changing the world. But the algorithms are under attack. And this is what's interesting about paradigms and paradigm shifts is that the algorithm comes from a whole new age. It comes from digital. But of course, the old system, what we call the industrial capitalist society of the past, it had politics at the center, it had industry at the center, it had academia at the center. These were the three major centers that kept industrial capitalist society stable. And they were brilliant at doing that before the Internet arrived. But of course, they're all under threat. Politics is under threat. It's really messy at the moment. Old industries are under threat because their old advertising methods don't work any longer. They can't pay their way to your attention. You want something more than that. And academia is of course in a huge crisis because academia stopped producing really good science decades ago, and it's basically now just a career path for losers, to be honest. So these institutions then attack the algorithm, and we call that the corruption of money. The capitalists will throw money at their problem. They will think that if we scream louder and bombard you with more advertising, somehow you're gonna listen to us. And we have now a science that proves that if an ad interrupts on YouTube, you get irritated with the brand you're seeing, and 995 out of a thousand times, you have a negative impression of the brand that just interrupted your communication. That's how terrible ads are according to us now. We hate it. We call it spam. But still, old industry knows nothing else but to throw money at the problem and put even more advertising in front of us as if that would help them. They desperately get our attention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) Can I jump in with you?

(Alexander Bard at 00:13:28) Yeah, sure, sure. Go ahead. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) So I started this podcast five years ago, 500 episodes ago, right? And we were two years into it or so, 200 episodes in, and we were getting more and more requests for people to be advertisers and sponsor the show, right? But when I had gone around and talked to people, just randomly at the mall or run into my wife's friends or something, I'd ask them, hey, do you listen to podcasts? And if they did, I'd say, oh, what's your favorite podcast? And I picked up on a pattern. You know, you talk to a bunch of people who aren't connected and you hear them say the same thing.

(Alexander Bard at 00:14:03) Customers and users. Exactly the right people. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) Yes, exactly. So what they were saying was something along the lines of, oh, I love this podcast about X, but I stopped. It got really popular and I kinda stopped listening to it when it got ads, because it got really popular then people put ads on it. So I made an early decision for the show and I was like, I'm never gonna put ads on it. And then when sponsors came along, I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna put ads. You can pay to come on and we'll do deliverables and we'll promote the episode through paid advertising so it'll get more exposure than the normal episodes. And we put together these sponsorship packages and people told me I was crazy for a while. And then, you know, we're crushing it now. We have 11 employees. It's an amazing business for us and we don't run one mid-roll, pre-roll, post-roll ad in the history of our business. And I talk to the competitors that we have, you know, because we're all kinda friends in the industry, and we make 10 to 20 times the revenue they do.

(Alexander Bard at 00:15:05) Write a book about it, and you're gonna make millions of dollars, right? Because advertising is in crisis. This is exactly the news they're looking for. Has anybody provided us with the model that is customer user-friendly?

(Alexander Bard at 00:15:16) But never, ever compromise on the customer user experience. Always return to them. If they get the slightest bit irritated, back off. You've gone way too far. It's a bit like, you know, trying to seduce somebody on a date, you know?

(Alexander Bard at 00:15:29) You are allowed to be a little bit straightforward, right? You are allowed to do that. People respect you for trying out. They know that you need to make money to have a business. They need to pay your guys that are employed.

(Alexander Bard at 00:15:41) You know, you need to make a profit. They know all those things. They respect that. But if they get ads in their face constantly all the time, they just get sick of it. And that's what we call the corruption of money, and it infiltrates the algorithms. Then it's called search optimization.

(Alexander Bard at 00:15:55) And I tell you what, I hate search optimization. Anybody does when you start looking at it. Because search optimization is like somebody didn't get that high in the algorithm because their product wasn't that good. So they're trying to cheat their way upwards by employing people who manipulate the algorithm to get to the top of it. Now Google and these guys are aware of this problem because it actually cuts into their profits.

(Alexander Bard at 00:16:17) It makes their search algorithms worse. So Google employs a lot of people to try to find out who's trying to sneak their way up the algorithm. That's the only natural thing that happens. But companies are too naive to realize that there's been tons of money in search optimization, which I've warned them about for years, and they lose the money, and they fall in the algorithms, of course, because they get punished, because they're cheaters, as they should be. Any old woman running a bazaar in Persia three thousand years ago could have taught you this.

(Alexander Bard at 00:16:43) Don't cheat when you trade, right? Then you have the problem. The next problem with the algorithms today is the manipulation of politics. And this is what we have woke and stuff like that going on at the moment, because politicians want to infiltrate.

(Alexander Bard at 00:16:56) They want to get into our heads, right, and manipulate us. And they think the algorithms are the key, and the algorithms are designed like they were designed by some evil guy who was sitting there trying to go into your brains. And politicians are really, really into this idea to actually manipulate your mind. So we call this the manipulation of the algorithms. A customer user-friendly algorithm will do when I type search—I want what I'm looking for.

(Alexander Bard at 00:17:22) I don't want Google to politically manipulate me. I don't want Google to commercially manipulate me by sneaking ads into the algorithm. And there's also a third force here. We can leave that shortly at the end. That's conforming me as well.

(Alexander Bard at 00:17:34) And that's what academia is trying to do with us. Academia today is trying to conform us all to think alike. That's why academia is obsessed with diversity. And what they mean when they talk about diversity is a diversity of looks, not a diversity of opinion, not a diversity of talent. Those are the real diversities.

(Alexander Bard at 00:17:55) The diversity of opinion thrives in your company because you have a lot of different ideas. You make better products. A diversity of talents is also great for a company because then you build better products. You get different talents and you build the product. If you want to have the best possible product or service, you need a diversity of talents, diversity of opinions in the workplace. But you don't need a diversity of looks necessarily. So a diversity of looks could be a diversity of opinions and talents, but it's not guaranteed.

(Alexander Bard at 00:18:23) So what's happening is that academia is pressing us by pushing these diversity offices into corporations to have a diversity of looks. We call this the Benettonization. It's from an Italian fashion brand called Benetton that used to have fashion commercials in the 1980s that were playful, and they have kids of different skin colors in these commercials. And it was fun, and you wanted to wear their clothes. The joke isn't funny any longer because, undisturbedly, people who look different or have a different background than others are actually then quoted.

(Alexander Bard at 00:18:55) They use some quotas, thrown into the companies. They're never trusted because of their expertise. They're never trusted because of their real talents. And we're then creating a sort of political minefield inside technology companies that does no service to anybody. The real diversity is gone, and it's simply symbolic diversity we're concentrating on.

(Alexander Bard at 00:19:14) And this is only because academia could come up with nothing better than they would do when they would do the Internet and have careers in tech companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:23) You mentioned a little bit about a minefield there. How have we gotten to the place where—I mean, you're able to speak fluidly about this. I don't have enough experience here to speak fluidly. But you're fluid and you have a lot of confidence. When I tend to go to speak, I tend to pull up a map of the minefield.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43) And like, how do I dance around this to hit my point, but also not get people up in arms and frustrate a lot of people? How have you achieved this clarity of being able to talk about it? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about it as a philosopher? Is that how you've gotten there?

(Alexander Bard at 00:20:01) Yes, I do. I've read thousands of books. And my co-writer, Jan Söderqvist, who I work with all the time, he's also read thousands of books. That's what you do.

(Alexander Bard at 00:20:10) You read the books to get a sense of history, which is the timeless aspect of your work. But then you must also be fascinated with the world you live in. And that's technology. That's all the tech magazines, that's getting involved in the tech industry, that's working for tech companies, that's constantly going to new places and being curious about, oh, how do you do things here in South Korea? Wow, you do it this way?

(Alexander Bard at 00:20:31) Or how do you do crypto here in Panama? You know, it's just like you travel around the world, which I do constantly, and you get invited to all these environments, and you're just grateful for every day you wake up because your curiosity never stops. That's how you do it. And to go back to the algorithms here, why that has become a mission is that I know that every customer, every user of the Internet out there, when you explain to them what it means to have an algorithm and to be a person of the future—that's what they say. Digital has come from the future.

(Alexander Bard at 00:21:02) It is now arriving. We can ask digital what it's like, how it's gonna affect our lives, how is AI gonna affect our lives, you know? We can try to figure this out. But then, as always historically, there are always losers when you have dramatic technological changes.

(Alexander Bard at 00:21:17) So we call this a paradigm shift. And then we need to very clearly identify what is the old paradigm. Who used to have power, say, thirty years ago? What is politics? Politics is way less important now than it was thirty years ago.

(Alexander Bard at 00:21:31) It used to be advertising and, you know, the old commercial industry as we knew it. It's far less powerful than it is now because tech has taken over their world, and tech is now dominating. And, of course, academia is not what it used to be. I work in India a lot. Nobody goes to universities because they join edtech companies, and they get their certificates through non-fungible tokens, and that's better than Harvard.

(Alexander Bard at 00:21:54) It takes them a year to study. It took three years at Harvard, and they're fantastic students. The edtech revolution is next. It's gonna kill universities. It's the same digitalization we see everywhere else in society.

(Alexander Bard at 00:22:05) Somebody comes along with a tech solution that's number one, is a solution to a problem nobody thought could be solved. Then it turns out that behind that solution, you could also solve all the old problems quicker and better and cheaper. And three, you can do that in a more comfortable way. You can just have your laptop, live anywhere you like in the world, and do the work from your laptop. That means you kill the old systems.

(Alexander Bard at 00:22:26) So I always like to take people back to, say, Paris in 1789, because at least you've heard about the French Revolution. In America, yeah, because you had a fantastic American Revolution at the same time. But if you recall the French Revolution, the new was in the streets of Paris. You know, the people in the streets of Paris, they might be shabby. They lived in small apartments.

(Alexander Bard at 00:22:47) They were urban, you know, but they could read and write and count. And what they went up against was the old nobility in Versailles, who were a decadent nobility of, say, 40,000 people who were just having these posh parties where they were obsessed with etiquette and tonality and all these kind of superficial things. But the real problem was that the people in Versailles, the old nobility, couldn't read, write, and count. So they had no tabloids where they could read every day what was going on in Paris.

(Alexander Bard at 00:23:15) They just had rumors. They had no encyclopedias where they could study the entire history of mankind and learn from A to Z about everything, including going to the letter G and finding out what a guillotine is. So if you're in the streets of Paris, you build yourself your own guillotine. You pulled the guillotine out to Versailles. You said, listen.

(Alexander Bard at 00:23:34) You 40,000 guys are standing in the way. You're the old nobility. And because you've opposed us aggressively and we are the new, we're gonna kill you. And they did. And if you were sitting in Paris reading the tabloids about the decadence of Versailles in 1789, you probably joined in.

(Alexander Bard at 00:23:52) It's perfectly understandable. Now we're probably not gonna kill the old institutions by literally killing people, hopefully not, but we have to get rid of them. And we have to replace these old institutions with a new sort of technology-driven solutions from digital. And in that case, we're only very premature. We only have big tech so far.

(Alexander Bard at 00:24:13) We have the collection and processing of data. It creates wonderful new values for humanity. We know it's gonna change the world. But we also have to have what's called the sensocracy, and we have to have what's called the protopian attitude. I can go into that if you like.

(Alexander Bard at 00:24:26) You can read the books. But we're only having the first of three, what we call netocracies. These are the new elites that will come out of digital, will take over the world, and then hopefully try to distribute the magic that they create to everybody. That's how paradigm works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) Where we're at right now, these new—yeah, what do we call them? New what?

(Alexander Bard at 00:24:44) Netocracies. Our first book twenty-two years ago was called The Netocrats. And that's where we started studying using Nietzsche and Marx, actually. Nietzsche and Marx.

(Alexander Bard at 00:24:54) We used these old guys to describe what could a new nobility look like that was thriving on digital. And, of course, we described, you know, Silicon Valley to begin with. I went to Burning Man and discovered that Burning Man was located between Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. It was a cultural expression of the Silicon Valley revolution. It was absolutely obvious when you came from the outside and enjoyed it.

(Alexander Bard at 00:25:18) You realized, okay, then participatory culture is the new form of art. It's gonna kill the galleries with white walls, and it does today. Then you realize participatory culture is the new spirituality. It's the new form of religion. Then we wrote a book about that.

(Alexander Bard at 00:25:33) The next year, I was welcomed to the Burning Man World Conference to give a speech. And everybody was crying when I declared, what you guys are doing here in the desert, 70,000 people, is actually deeply spiritual. And now Burning Man has more than 250 children around the world. There are burns everywhere around the world where young people meet and artistically and creatively express themselves through new technologies. And it's fantastic.

(Alexander Bard at 00:25:58) So what we haven't seen yet is what will replace politics and what will replace academia, but we're seeing how that's being built. And the most difficult one that we're working with as philosophers at the moment is what will replace politics, because the Chinese certainly have a very clear idea what that would be. They're creating what's called a sensocracy with only one guy at the top. Sensocracy comes from sensors interconnected with our senses. Your eyes, your ears, your skin—your senses are connected now with machines everywhere, literally.

(Alexander Bard at 00:26:34) There are cameras and microphones and satellites everywhere. So this is unavoidable. And what we're trying to do now is to rethink the U.S. Constitution, rethink the French Revolution, to respond to the Chinese and construct a philosophy which you can build as a sensocracy, which is not a police state. That has all the advantages of what the Chinese are trying to do, but none of the disadvantages. And here, of course, as philosophers, we work closely with governments in countries like Taiwan, South Korea, India—the ones that see the Chinese experiment firsthand.

(Alexander Bard at 00:27:08) They're sitting front row, and they don't want that. They don't want that. But they want the use of technology to now try to figure out quickly where the advantages or where the disadvantages of an AI-driven political system, which will replace politics as we know it. And the reason why sensocracy will happen is simple. Why would you vote every four years when you literally vote every second in your life through your behaviors?

(Alexander Bard at 00:27:32) The AI will be absolutely superior to figure out what you want politically compared to any politician who's just guessing. The scary thing is that if we don't think about this properly before it happens, the Chinese will be ahead of us, and people will think that their system is the only one that's valid. So it's a fantastic work to be doing. Incredibly rewarding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) So what we're saying is that the evolution of technology will create this sensocracy. Is that how you say it?

(Alexander Bard at 00:28:03) Yeah. Sensocracy. Yeah. Sensocracy, like senses. Sensocracy. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) And so, like, China's dealing with that, and that's essentially the consolidation of sensors with your senses up at the top with one person. And so, like, that's the natural evolution. And so what we're trying to do as the rest of the world is come up with a different framework, different philosophy, a different way of thinking about how to deal with what happens when the technology naturally leads there that's more open and free. But at the same time, we're fighting other battles too within our countries. What country are you currently spending the most time in or a citizen of?

(Alexander Bard at 00:28:41) I'm constantly traveling, and I live in a small country called Sweden, and I work in a country called Slovenia. I love small countries because in small countries you can have an effect very quickly. I love Singapore, Dubai. I love Puerto Rico and Panama when I go to the Americas, you know, because in smaller countries you can have an effect. You can try it as early, and you can also then know if they're wrong.

(Alexander Bard at 00:29:00) You have a more scientific approach to the whole thing. But I would say that the most important work I'm doing at the moment is that I am established now. So having worked with tech for thirty years, I am now seeing a lot of these guys are successful in big tech. And what I'm fostering them basically to do is that you are successful. You made the money. Now it's time for you to pay back.

(Alexander Bard at 00:29:21) And that's why I work with philanthropy. Because what happens is that when you go from this industrial mode over to, say, the political mode, you need to first talk to these guys and turn them into philanthropists. So I work for something called Foundation. We're here in Scandinavia. We do all kinds of things.

(Alexander Bard at 00:29:39) They're, you know, car battery factories, stem cells. Most of all, what I'm interested in is psychedelic research. We have a whole company set up for that, which is like academic first-class medical research on psychedelics. And they're all thrilled about this. But the most important thing they will have to do eventually is that we're gonna have an army of big tech philanthropists to say, well, we made it, but now we just give our resources away for people then construct an open and free sesocracy.

(Alexander Bard at 00:30:07) And I think the name for that is free and open sesocracy. And the first thing they then must do is to provide customers and users with a free and open algorithm and stop manipulating and corrupting the algorithms for us so that we can all have an algorithm that reflects us. And I'll tell what people really want. They really want the free and open algorithm. They want an algorithm to reflect them, to reflect their tribe, to reflect their preferences, but they also wanna be surprised.

(Alexander Bard at 00:30:33) Because if you're never surprised, you get stupid. You can explain that to a 90-year-old in five minutes. And that principle is another important principle called Antagony. The Antagonic Principle. So it is that, for example, if you work with Spotify, you got a playlist, and then you ask a Spotify user, what would you say if every tenth song is just randomly picked from somewhere and surprises you?

(Alexander Bard at 00:30:54) And you know what? People love it. Because they know that's like an insurance against our playlist becoming old and boring and tedious and predictable. So it's not like, we know you will probably like this song, so here's another song. It's more like, you'll probably not like this song, but why don't we throw it in there anyway, see how you react to it?

(Alexander Bard at 00:31:11) And that's called antagonism. This antagonic principle is the principle that the Chinese hate. What about an algorithm where the only thing that irritates you? It's just other human beings in your society who probably disagree with you. And that people love.

(Alexander Bard at 00:31:25) It turns out it's very human. And that's how you create both resilience, and you create intelligence. That's how you create collective intelligence. Any 19-year-old can understand that if I occasionally am confronted with something I'm uncomfortable with, I will grow and expand as a human being. That's the message.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) So is there any censorship at all in the—like, we're talking about, you know, Google and their algorithms, and you've seen different organizations release behind-the-scene videos where they're injecting their concepts of, like, ephemeral experiences to modify short-term results based off of, like, their personal views and all sorts of little different things that they'll use to modify search results or inject their concepts into those. How—and then you're talking about, like, let's have algorithms that just do what we want them to do without any sort of, like, extra stuff in there. So—

(Alexander Bard at 00:32:24) Exactly. So the trick is this. You cannot have a totally free and open society in that sense because then you get anarchy. We'll very soon have people who order guns to kill somebody else, and nobody can trace it. That's one of the problems of crypto, for example.

(Alexander Bard at 00:32:40) So we won't accept that because the loyalty towards other people in our in-group stays tribal. People can go up to, say, 1,200 to 1,500 people at most and feel loyalty towards everybody in the group and behave as if crime did not exist. As soon as the population is larger, move towards nations, empires even, you know, millions of people, you must have a police force to internally control the population. You must have a military to also defend the population from outside threats. This is called membranics, how you try to define these things.

(Alexander Bard at 00:33:14) You know, membranes are everywhere. They're in machines, they're in animals, they're in human beings, everywhere. So it's about in and out. And we always check with people where you're comfortable having a membrane. And it turns out that the innermost membrane is the family, then comes the clan, then comes the tribe.

(Alexander Bard at 00:33:31) Once you go outside the tribe and you go towards a society as a whole or a nation or a city, it will no longer hold. You need a police. Right? Once you've discovered that, and that's been historically—you can validate that, say it's been the case for five thousand years—it doesn't really change. Then, okay, that's where loyalty sort of wears thin. What you do then is to work with blockchains, which are fantastic in creating loyalty between strangers.

(Alexander Bard at 00:33:57) And eventually, in the future, maybe we have a society where thousands of people can actually trust each other, and then you can have less policing. But I am one of these guys who said anarchy could be possible in the future, but it's not possible now. Because human beings cannot handle it, we do have technologies to make it work. So what you do instead is to say, have some kind of policing. Then I think what's absolutely vital today is that people are terrified of the eerie sense when they go online that somebody's controlling them without telling them.

(Alexander Bard at 00:34:26) I hate the term nudging. I hate the idea that we should manipulate people to behave in a desired way without telling them. I think that's exactly the wrong way to go. If you say you're on Twitter, you should publicly make public every day that this has been banned, this tweet has been taken off, this guy has been banned for good or whatever because they didn't follow the rules that we set up. Say you run a dinner party.

(Alexander Bard at 00:34:52) You invite a lot of people. You don't invite anybody to come to a dinner party. And if somebody brings a guest, of course, you still have this last position where you can actually throw them out. You can just say, I'm the dinner party host. I warned you, but your behavior at this dinner party is unacceptable, and you're not gonna destroy my party, so you have to go.

(Alexander Bard at 00:35:11) That is censorship. That's the good censorship because it keeps a really good dinner party going, and it's just deeply human. And it's when you look at this, how the brain works. Again, looking at the customer, the user, always go to the human beings. Right?

(Alexander Bard at 00:35:24) And how they operate and how tribal works for them. You can work with a lot of tribal formats. But as soon as you go to larger formats, that you must have some kind of policing enforced. We call it good moderation, and I think we need to train people to be good moderators. They should get paid to do it.

(Alexander Bard at 00:35:40) And I think the best forums online in the future will have really solid good moderators, like good patriarchs and matriarchs who've been around for a long time. And just like outside the old bazaar in Persia, you have the oldest woman sitting there. You can't fool her. You come up to her and say, well, come all the way from Sudan with some carpets. And she goes, those carpets from Sudan?

(Alexander Bard at 00:36:01) Are you kidding me? They're from next door. They're carpets. I won't let you go in. Next guy, please.

(Alexander Bard at 00:36:06) Right? That's moderation, and we need it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) Right now, a lot of our moderators are, like, interns.

(Alexander Bard at 00:36:17) Get old women to do it because—let's do it. Yeah. Because, yeah, it's like training for them to do it. I think that's the wrong way.

(Alexander Bard at 00:36:24) I know Facebook, for example, I almost cried when I saw that they employed teenagers in Ireland to do policing in countries where nobody spoke English. It was like, why? Well, it's a low-paid job. Why is that a low-paid job when that should be the highest paid job at Facebook? Because at the end of the day, the curator of an art gallery today is better paid than the artist.

(Alexander Bard at 00:36:48) Because the value of the whole art show is down to the exquisite talent and Fingerspitzgefühl of the curator. I wrote about this twenty-five years ago and said the curators will rule the world eventually, and the highest paid job in any organization should be the moderator. It will pay off if you invest in it. I can assure you that because we're all dying to get out of Facebook forums and these terribly run places full of trolls and trash. We wanna get away from that.

(Alexander Bard at 00:37:16) We wanna go into the quality arguments. Personally, I run mailing lists. That's a great way, but I don't start a mailing list. I have some really professional administrators who run it first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) So how would you—when we're talking about, like, Twitter and censorship, right? From what I gather, your general idea is, like, better censors. Right? Like, more intelligent—

(Alexander Bard at 00:37:40) I always say pick the toughest who loves the group. So take the toughest of the candidates who want to be moderators. But make sure the toughest loves the group and the theme. It takes a personal interest in it. That's the best moderator you can possibly have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) So let's say we have that moderator at Twitter, and they're moderating all of Twitter globally. So are they imposing their views globally? How does that work?

(Alexander Bard at 00:38:11) No. I wouldn't do that with Twitter today. I wouldn't do that with Facebook today. Twitter, Facebook, gone for the model of try to make as many people as possible members of our forum. Right?

(Alexander Bard at 00:38:22) So Twitter and Facebook serve rather as a sort of generally open square. But the power will not be in the square. The power will be in a closed room of an elite. It always is. And this is what we call the netocracy.

(Alexander Bard at 00:38:36) So if you wanna talk to, say, you wanna talk to Peter Thiel, he's not gonna, you know, meet you on Twitter, is he?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:42) So the context for that—now I'm kinda catching up to you. Your talk track was going more towards like, this is how we deal with a network that's appropriately sized with the correct people. Not this is how we fix the existing massive mono networks that are imposing their culture on the entire group at once.

(Alexander Bard at 00:39:05) No. Because Facebook and Twitter will be underclass phenomena anyway. The elite will be there. They'll stay for Twitter a bit longer, but they're out of Instagram. They're out of WhatsApp.

(Alexander Bard at 00:39:13) They're out of Facebook already. That's just underclass phenomena. It's just time past for the industry to try to be some kind of user content entertainment, nothing else. There's no quality left there. If you wanna be sort of a serious student or something today or be an expert on something, you don't go to those places to find out anything.

(Alexander Bard at 00:39:30) Wikipedia, though, which is actually a communist project, which makes it quite interesting, works wonderfully. And it's methods built on Wikipedia are much better methods because you actually pick out an elite. By through hard work, people establish themselves and become Wikipedians. And through by following the rules again and again and again, they get rewarded for it. They get credibility.

(Alexander Bard at 00:39:51) It's like, if you're a Wikipedian and you get to edit the page on Israel versus Palestine, you're at the top of the heap at Wikipedia. And that's a culture, and it's fantastic because it was the hard work that made Wikipedia work. That's why I like products like Wikipedia and Burning Man. They're duocracies. You need to invest hard work into the system to actually make it work.

(Alexander Bard at 00:40:12) The same thing with crypto and blockchains. You need to put tons of energy into it, whether you like it or not, to make it work. Once you have to make an effort to make something work, all the lazy guys will leave, and you will have an upper-class phenomenon instead. But I think we're gonna have very, very advanced networks very soon. They're gonna be called conspiracies because conspiracy network is actually the same thing.

(Alexander Bard at 00:40:34) And we talked about the network society for the past thirty years. I don't think we have the conspiracies yet. People want them to exist because they love conspiracies. They love ghosts. They love spirits and all kinds of things.

(Alexander Bard at 00:40:45) But we will have conspiracies. We'll definitely have a conspiracy. And this is the crucial question. Will there be just one conspiracy that rules the world, which is the Chinese model, or will we have several competing conspiracies, which is the basis of the U.S. Constitution? And that, I think, is definitely preferable.

(Alexander Bard at 00:41:04) That's the most important question right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) So can we look at the Twitters and the Facebooks as institutions that will eventually be abolished by future better technologies?

(Alexander Bard at 00:41:16) I think we'll have them there. I think the AI will always go out looking for talents. So, like, Twitter, Facebook, that's like talent scouting. It's just like people express themselves through these media if they have access to nothing else, then you find talents out there, and then you pick them up instantly to the major networks. That's why—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:35) That's good. That is good.

(Alexander Bard at 00:41:36) Yeah. We will have a meritocracy. One of the great dreams of both Paris and, say, America in 1789 was the idea of meritocracy. Meritocracy will happen. The diversity of talents will happen.

(Alexander Bard at 00:41:51) The best talents will—they will succeed because the system we're creating with AI will be so good pointing out where you got a human talent that's worth pursuing. And we'll pick them up. That's what venture capital does now. That's what left Silicon Valley. Venture capital is global today.

(Alexander Bard at 00:42:07) It doesn't care where you live. You can be a digital nomad, have a great company set up, they will invest in you. And that's a perfect example of how efficient now the networks are at finding and sucking up the talent. So we will all get a chance to prove our talent. That I can guarantee.

(Alexander Bard at 00:42:25) That I can guarantee. Meritocracy will happen. The meritocracy will happen in a very sophisticated way. We will still have a massive class society. There'll be enormous differences in power and influence between people at the bottom, people at the top.

(Alexander Bard at 00:42:38) And I can teach this to kids. I teach the kids, if you're sitting there doing time-pass games all day long, you're a loser. If you sit there and social network with other kids and figure out what they do, you're somewhere in between. If you work things out with people that are older than you, who then teach you and mentor you, you're a winner. Right?

(Alexander Bard at 00:42:56) The kids can get this and know they can in five minutes, they get it because it's actually a class structure eventually stabilizes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:04) Yes. Two points. One, I love that because I've noticed that just through not necessarily trying to make this happen, but through the questions I've asked in life, I've always ended up being like the youngest person in the room. And now being older and looking back on it, I was like, okay, I wasn't sitting there with the objective of being the youngest person in the room. I was sitting there with the objective getting my answers, you know, that I needed from the curiosity that I had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:29) And that's kind of just what ended up happening. But another thing that you said too is you're exactly right on the venture capital front. I have raised venture capital money. And I more recently—I started getting emails over the past year and a half where they will literally be from, like, venture capital scouts that say, if your P&L meets these three bullet points, then we will give you this much money. Reply. It's so far different than what it was five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) Well, now they're just, like, super transactional. If you meet this, reply, we'll validate it, and we'll give you this amount of money. And I thought that was really interesting.

(Alexander Bard at 00:44:09) Yeah. Because they discovered that they don't wanna spend too much time going too deeply into a company. They know what they're looking for, so they give you the bullet points. Then they could put AI in doing the details later on or whatever.

(Alexander Bard at 00:44:20) But they know that if they spend the money wisely on these different products that fulfill these different bullet points, then the market itself will then do the rest of the work. But if you think about what we've done in capital society, what is the most precious thing today? It is human beings and their attention. So the question is then, how do people give you their ears, and their eyes, and their attention? And how do they stay with it?

(Alexander Bard at 00:44:51) And that's exactly what algorithms are supposed to measure and nothing else. And that's why I think algorithms and meritocracy, fantastic potential to get it when you look at this. And meritocracy will indeed happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Where can I learn about this whole concept of networks? I mean, are these just your thoughts, or are these larger schools of thought that I can read more into about these networking structures?

(Alexander Bard at 00:45:13) In our books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:15) Okay. Can you give me a shout out for your books? Where, what books?

(Alexander Bard at 00:45:18) Yeah. The first one is called The Netocrats. The second, third one, we haven't touched today. The fourth and the fifth one we touched. The fourth book is called Syntheism, Creating God in the Internet Age, because technology is moving in a certain direction. God has never existed, but God will exist one day because we will create God if you want God. We're creating guardian angels at the moment. They're called algorithms. We're creating telepathy at the moment. It's called smartphones. You know, the magic of yesterday is the technology of tomorrow. That's what technologies do and do beautifully. They're magicians. They create magic. So that's Syntheism. And the fifth one is called Digital Libido, Sex, Power, Violence in the Network Society. And it's really about the mess we're going through at the moment. For example, we predicted the war between Ukraine and Russia. We predicted there'd be war between paradigms. And so a lot of that is in the books. So you can read Bard and Söderqvist, and you can then move from the Bard and Söderqvist books. You can move into the other fields as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) I will have follow-up questions. So maybe next year, we'll have you back on and I can sort of get better questions for you now that I know you a little bit.

(Alexander Bard at 00:46:23) I would love to. And I can guarantee one thing. You must write at least a chapter in your book on how you figured out you could make money from the old capitalist while still running a first class attentionalist talk show. I mean, that alone is a chapter. That alone is a book, you know. People are dying to find the magic of those things today. How do you, when they finally realize, how do I not irritate people? It starts there. Well, you still have to tell us. Right? How do you not, well, you have to be entertaining, and you have to be informative. The principle for algorithms is simple. It's called infotainment. The one thing we require when we go online is that we either want to be entertained or we want to be learned, educated. And if we're both, we love you. So if you provide some kind of information that is not infotaining, you're dead. That's what communication must be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:13) Yeah. They're vitamins, but they also taste good.

(Alexander Bard at 00:47:16) Yeah. I taught algorithms twenty years ago how you build them and build them exactly the way they should be built twenty years ago. And it's only after that the pressure from politics through manipulation and the pressure of corruption from money, where the ads didn't get the clicks any longer, so they forced the ads into the algorithms, which is, of course, corrupting them. And also, I saw suddenly academia woke up, and they got irritated because the Internet was killing them. And they're going to be furious over the next twenty years. As long as, you know, when the universities start dying, they're going to attack the Internet, and they're all going to say the same thing that old people always do when youth come and kill them. They're going to say, well, you're immoral. You're fake news. You're fake academia. You're fake politics. I always tell my students, I am a very public person in Scandinavia. And I've never written a true word about me in any newspaper ever. So the truth about me was finally kind of discovered when the Internet came along. So never trust the news. It was always fake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:13) Right? That's funny because that's a hard thing to do, when you start asking questions like what is truth. Right? When people say that's—

(Alexander Bard at 00:48:22) The truth. My dad, he's South African. He told me when I was six years old. Here are five newspapers every day, son. Here's the communist one. Here's the Pentecost Christian one. Here are the three ones in between. Read them all five, then you become smart. Once you get the entire perspective, I mean, that's at least four antagonists and your own comfortable view, hopefully. Once you can accept more antagonists into your worldview, your worldview will be expanded. And once you start loving that, once you start loving being constantly challenged and expanded, that's what love is. That's what love is. It's to feel expanded in the presence of other people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:03) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.