The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Back in 2006, a young interface designer came up with the idea that rather than making people click to another page to continue reading, they should just get an endlessly reloading single page that goes on forever. That "infinite scroll" wound up being a centerpiece of the attention economy — it's how you can scroll mindlessly for hours without taking a break — and that young designer, Aza Raskin, became an activist fighting back against the industry he came up in.

Today Raskin is the cofounder, with Tristan Harris, of The Center for Humane Technology, and he and Harris helped create the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which articulated the dangers of social media to the world. Now he's trying to do the same with A.I., and in this hourlong conversation he reveals the cultish enthusiasm, misplaced incentives, and truly catastrophic risks that the technology has brought into the world. He's a gifted communicator on the subject, and has made a new career inventing brilliant ways of bringing it across to the rest of us — you'll hear that here. (He and Harris also host Your Undivided Attention, a podcast on all of this.) We talk about the cult of endless growth that is Silicon Valley, why A.I. is different from anything that's come before it, and his hopes for creating some restraint in a world that he feels is accelerating out of control without it.

We’ve all experienced loneliness, but could you really describe what it is, and what it does to you, beyond the physical experience of isolation? Before this conversation, I couldn’t. But David Jay has taken the invisible, unnameable effects of loneliness and turned them into an actionable recipe for evaluating and improving friendship and community in our lives. (He explains it all in his 2024 book Relationality.) It sounds hokey — and he’s the first to admit that we’re doing a terrible job in society of quantifying the value of this stuff — but his work on the subject is quite rigorous, and the stakes are enormous: cultural disconnection, political authoritarianism, a mental and physical health crisis, and a deepening inability to fight our way out of all of it.

The good news is he has real advice, and shares it with me here. Please enjoy, and if you like the episode I beg you: share it with someone else!

Adam Rogers is a science journalist and the author of two amazing books about how we experience the world. His second, Full Spectrum, is about color. But we're here to discuss his first, Proof: The Science of Booze. Not just booze, though — what it symbolizes about magic and alchemy and history and chaos, and why our relationship to it is so fraught and fun and terrible. Basically what I learned is that it would improve the world enormously if everyone had to learn to handle themselves at a bar, but that we somehow need to do it without actually drinking. Also he's a great friend of mine, and it's my show, and I can have my friends on sometimes, okay?

If you like this show, do me a favor and share it with someone else! It helps enormously in bringing me to a new audience.

Trump's sudden, strange appeal took most political observers by surprise (it broke their necks, frankly), but not Bart Bonikowski. The NYU professor of politics and sociology has been looking at the global rise of populism for over a decade, along with the ideologies and forms of nationalism that help to explain why it's got us all in its grasp at the moment. We talk about the common causes of this weird kind of politics, the most dangerous outcomes it might lead us to, and what the antidotes might be.

Readings:

• “Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment” (British Journal of Sociology, 2017)
  Clarifies distinctions among populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism and shows that spikes in radical‑right support come from framing strategies resonating with folks experiencing national status threats pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+1cifar.ca+1sociology.berkeley.edu.

• “Varieties of American Popular Nationalism” (with Paul DiMaggio, AJS, 2016)
  Identified four distinct nationalist mindsets—disengaged, civic, ardent, restrictive—and mapped their prevalence russellsage.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4.

• “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’” (with Feinstein & Bock, AJS, 2021)
  Shows how Republicans and Democrats increasingly diverge in their definitions of America—Republicans leaning exclusionary, Democrats inclusive journals.uchicago.edu+2en.wikipedia.org+2cifar.ca+2.

• “Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020)” (2022)
  Uses neural language modeling to track ideological trends across historic campaigns cifar.ca+1journals.sagepub.com+1en.wikipedia.org+6pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+6papers.ssrn.com+6.

• “Trump’s Populism…” (2019 chapter in When Democracy Trumps Populism)
  Dissects the nationalist rhetoric in Trump’s campaigns and situates it within broader democratic patterns nyuscholars.nyu.edu.

When I was writing my book The Loop, I was looking for experts in the degree to which we misunderstand one another, and several people pointed me at this week’s guest. He and I had an hourlong phone conversation, and while he undoubtedly doesn’t remember it (but is too polite to say so), for me it was a deeply formative experience.

Lord John Alderdice grew up the son of an Irish presbyterian minister in and out of Belfast, and has been a psychiatrist, a politician, and a researcher into violence and peace. His work on the Good Friday Accords helped to end the troubles in Northern Ireland, and he’s been a trusted source of insight and scholarship for those seeking an end to violence in dozens of conflicts around the world ever since.

In this week’s episode, he discusses the deeply misunderstood power of really and truly listening, over long periods of time, in correcting disturbed historic relationships and setting them back on a path toward peace, and our conversation is a very interesting accompaniment to my interview with John Patty and Elizabeth Penn about the frailty of democracy from a few weeks back.

Here are three recent pieces of research from Lord Alderdice about the "how" of negotiation and why we're in such global disorder, as he puts it.

Alderdice, John, Lord (2021) "Conflict, Complexity, and Cooperation," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 33 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol33/iss1/9

Alderdice, John, Lord, (2023) New insights into the psychology of individuals and large groups in a world of changing conflicts (2023) International Political Science Review, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231177444

Alderdice, John, Lord (2010) “Off the couch and round the conference table”. Chapter 1 in Off the Couch – Contemporary Psychoanalytic Applications, Eds Alessandra Lemma and Matthew Patrick, Routledge.

Lord Alderdice is refreshing not just for his optimism that we can find a way to peace, but because that optimism is based in decades of hard experience pursuing it. I hope you enjoy it.

Here's what it's like on the ground when you're covering a protest, why it's so hard to give an accurate picture of what's happening, and why it can be misleading. Also: police targeting journalists is very much a thing.

Duke Professor of Law Nita Farahany has documented the growing industry of companies and devices that try to read your intentions, analyze your mind state, and generally get inside your brain. No, really: in her 2023 book The Battle for Your Brain she documents hundreds of instances in which everyone from employers to authoritarian regimes are hoping to use this stuff on us. And now she's looking ahead in a new book to how technology is changing our ability to think at all.

The Trump administration is describing its Palantir project as an effort to do away with waste and fraud by eliminating silos. But as other nations have learned, the silos are what make the difference between an efficient digital government and chilling, oppressive surveillance.

Read this piece and more at TheRipCurrent.com.

It used to be that being a tech journalist was about boosterism and gadgetry. Now it’s like reporting inside the Pentagon, if the Pentagon were staffed by incredibly motivated and secretive experts who are regularly reassured they’re doing holy work, threatened with exile if they ever speak to a reporter, and paid more than any journalist can imagine. And yet investigative tech reporter Paris Martineau has single-handedly conducted investigations that led to the exposure and resignation of multiple CEOs — no small feat in an industry that is famously difficult to pierce as a journalist. In this hourlong interview we talk about how hard it is to find good sources inside Big Tech, and how critically important it is to do that now, when those companies and their leaders are truly learning to run the world.

Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!

Under its fourth president, Toomas Ilves, Estonia went from a struggling newly liberated democracy to one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world. In this hourlong conversation, Ilves describes what Estonia can teach us about how to fight corruption through technology, truly root out waste and fraud, and empower everyday citizens — and what it looks like when things go the wrong way. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!