The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Read the complete piece at your leisure, and circle back to my conversation with Lawrence Lessig, in which he describes how his early, revolutionary ideas about the need to lighten up on copyright law in this country have been totally upended about A.I.

Also, for context on the Google Books history and how it led us to this unfortunate moment, have a look at The Exact Moment We Gave It All to A.I.

I struggled with my own drinking habit for years, and I’m the kind of guy that has to be told to put the goddamn phone down — sometimes by the phone itself. So I think about addiction a great deal, and I find that everyone around me talks about their own habits in terms of addiction. And I decided to bring in an expert on addiction to define what it is, and where it’s headed in this country.

America pioneered the advertising, product design, and behavioral science that has made addiction one of our nation’s biggest industries, after all. From gambling to opioids, America has always been great at getting customers hooked. And yet as a culture, we blame addiction not on the industries that invent these products and push these habits — but on the customers who fall into the trap.

Now technology is inventing entirely new forms of addiction, from phone-based sports gambling to our dependence on sycophantic chatbots for company. Dr. Keith Humphreys is a psychiatrist at Stanford, a researcher at the Veterans’ Administration, and has worked for decades to understand drug and alcohol addiction, testifying before congress and working with state and federal officials to navigate the drug-infested waters we all find ourselves in at the moment. But he’s also deeply humane on the subject, and I find him both enlightening and very reassuring. Here’s hoping he helps you understand the difference between habit and addiction the way he’s helped me — have a look at his book Addiction: A Very Short Introduction, which I found fascinating — and whatever you’re grappling with, I hope you take some comfort from this episode. Thanks for listening.

When I was writing The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, I asked everyone around me what I should be reading. My thesis was that we needed to immediately begin resisting the companies trying to sell us A.I., because they were likely to amplify the worst parts of being human, rather than the best parts. (And that’s of course because the worst parts are easier to predict, and easier to sell to, and we just barely understand the best parts anyway.) So I wanted to read anything anyone had ever written about just how little we understood about ourselves running a successful society, now that companies were talking about using A.I. to do it. And over and over again, I heard the same phrase: Patty and Penn.

John Patty and Elizabeth Penn, professors at Emory University, use math to test our assumptions about politics. The political scientists, sociologists, and economists I was speaking to all urged me to check them out, so I fought my way through their groundbreaking 2014 book Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility and (after calling them up and making them explain it to me) came away with this shorthand understanding of what they’d found.

I grew up believing, as so many have, that on the right day, with the right words, in the right light a Jimmy Stewart or President Bartlett can convince America to come to its senses and do the necessary thing. (There’s now in fact a growing sentiment on the left of irritation with Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, for inspiring a generation of kids to walk directly into the buzzsaw of conservative win-at-all-costs politics believing the right monologue will protect them.) In Social Choice and Legitimacy Patty and Penn punched through centuries of political theory that seemed at its core to believe that democracy was a way to achieve consensus.

Nope, they said. Look at the math. You can’t have consensus. You may not even be able to have majority will. All you can realistically strive for in a functioning democracy is that we avoid capricious and arbitrary behavior well enough that everyone involved continues to believe in the legitimacy of the system. If we can achieve that bare minimum — and it’s hard — we get to live in a system in which tough decisions are made, lots of people don’t get their way, but everyone agrees that the process made sense. Less “of the people, by the people, for the people.” More “you can’t win ‘em all.”

In our hourlong conversation we talk about what it is to now live at a moment when democracy has produced more arbitrariness and capriciousness than ever, and when the core political tactic of the president and his supporters has been to undermine the legitimacy we need to keep going. They also talk about their new research: a look at how algorithms are poised to deepen arbitrariness and capriciousness, even as their makers sell them as being neutral and accurate. We also talk about what it is to work as husband and wife, and to weave that work through every aspect of their lives together as parents and partners — except one.

I hope you enjoy time with this fascinating duo.

The future of public discourse can't just be folksy, underpaid marketing, right?

Right?

Jake recounts a very bad night at a creator event, and describes the global pull away from thoughtful people investigating the truth online and toward everyone being paid peanuts to tell each other what to buy.

This is a special reading from The Rip Current. To subscribe (it's free!) and hear and read more content like this, visit TheRipCurrent.com.

Before she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts t…

When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:

Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy.

I was lost without it, but now I'm found!

Endless gratitude

Man did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.

Thanks for listening to The Rip Current podcast! This episode is available immediately to paid subscribers, and free subscribers get it a week later. Send it to someone in your life who thinks about technology, democracy, or corruption.

At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.

Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Before she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts to find out led her into being one of the world’s top experts on how we get worked by the illusion of popular sentiment online.

Her new book is Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, and in it she dissects the mechanics that made possible scams like The Big Lie during and after the 2020 election. DiResta has both a very realistic yet very ambitious idea about how we can learn to fight back online, and explains it beautifully in this episode. Enjoy!

The pioneer of open-source software and enemy of copyright tyranny has rethought his positions in the age of AI, but his fight against political corruption is more desperate than ever.

When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:

Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy.

I was lost without it, but now I'm found!

Endless gratitude

Man did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.

At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.

Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren’t just gossip fuel. They’re a vast business, one that’s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News, where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC New…

A special reading from the latest issue of The Rip Current, about the Trump tariffs, the the idiocy of the math, the effects he won’t see coming, and the reaction from CEOs, world leaders, and the markets.