Take A Break From The Feed w/ Amanda Mull

Paris Marx is joined by Amanda Mull to discuss the effects of constantly “monitoring the situation” through custom news, social, or live feeds, including higher rates of anxiety and disconnection, and what can be done to recalibrate.

Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek and writes the Buying Power column.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Amanda wrote about what it means to be monitoring the situation.
• Feeling overwhelmed by technology? There’s a club for that.
• Looking for a source of tech news? Checkout Aftermath, or Disconnect.
• Friend of the pod Casey Johnston has written about her DIY dumbphone method and reducing social media use.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When you have access to so much information, you there begins to be this like fundamental psychological mismatch between like how much you know and what you can do about it. And this was not as bad of a problem when information was um more gate kept. And like there are also downsides to information being more gate-kept, but one thing it provided you was uh information in ways that like it was that were designed for you as a regular person and not a subject matter expert to consume that made them make sense and contextualize them, contextualized them for like who you are generally.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

First of all, a big thank you to everyone who has started supporting the show this month already to help us hit our goal of 100 new supporters by the end of the month to help us continue providing these critical perspectives on the tech industry that you learn from every single week that helps you better understand what the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley are up to, what these tech companies are doing to our world and our lives, and why we really need something else, right? Why we really need to change this. This is part of the focus of the show and has been since day one, all the way back in 2020. I'm recording this a few days before the episode actually airs, so I can't say how many people have supported the show so far, but we're already, even as I record this, over a fifth of the way to our goal, and I'm sure we'll be even closer by the time that this airs. So thank you so much, first of all. And of course, if you do enjoy the work that I put into making the show every single week, and if you also want access to a number of premium episodes, ad-free episodes, full access to the new series that I'm working on right now that we're hoping to have out in May, along with the premium interviews that will be coming after that. You can certainly join existing supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwon's save us and signing up to join them and of course to support the show. And when you do that, you will not only get access to those premium shows, to those ad-free shows, but you will also get access to our Discord server. If you support at certain tiers, you will get access to stickers as well that I'll be sending out to you in the mail. Um, plus, you know, you get the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting Tech Won't Save Us and helping ensure I can continue doing this work. So thanks so much if you have supported already. Thanks for listening to Tech Won't Save Us, for supporting the show and making it so that I can keep doing this after six years, which is just fantastic. And, you know, I'm obviously biased, but I think we need something like Tech Won's Save Us to provide these perspectives on the tech industry that you're not getting in enough other places. Now, let's turn to this week's episode. Amanda Mole is a Bloomberg Business Week senior reporter and also writes the Buying Power column. She's been on the show before. I think she does fantastic work. And I wanted to have her back on this week because she wrote a column about this meme of monitoring the situation. And it feels like today we are constantly monitoring the situation, you know, with wars in Iran, with invasions of Venezuela, with everything going on in the world economy, it feels like we are always trying to become an expert on the next thing that's happening. We're always trying to, you know, collect data, collect information off of social media and through other, you know, other sources, I guess, um, so that we can understand what is happening. And we talk about what, you know, what actually is the effect of the way that we consume information in this way, whether it's positive or negative that we do so, or you know, maybe, maybe it's neither, right? Maybe it's just something that we need to understand. Um, but also like the broader consequences of how we consume information today, what it means about the information landscape, what it means about our trust in media and you know, traditional kind of institutions that provided us with information, and ultimately where this is all going. I to me, this is a fascinating conversation. It certainly intersects with the war in Iran that we have been talking about in recent weeks, but it is a bigger conversation than that as well, you know, thinking about social media, thinking about the way that the internet is transformed, how information is consumed, digested, created, um, and you know, what that means for the society that we live in. So I think that you're really going to enjoy this conversation. I certainly enjoyed hearing from Amanda again and getting her insights on all of this. And I think you will too. If you do enjoy this conversation, of course, consider going to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, becoming a supporter this month to help us hit our goal of a hundred new supporters for the show's sixth birthday, which again is just incredible that we've made it this far. But thank you again for supporting the show. Thank you again for listening. Um, and consider going over to Patreon to help us out this month and get access to all the things that I mentioned before. So thanks again and enjoy this week's conversation. Amanda, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Absolutely. Always happy to have you on the show and to chat and you know, really to read your column as well, which I I love checking out uh because you write about such fascinating topics that, you know, are sometimes related to the show and the listeners, but other times are completely unrelated and are still fascinating. And I and I love to read it. Um thank you. You of course, of course. But you had this uh, you know, this column recently where you were talking about this meme of monitoring the situation, right? And I think we're all kind of monitoring the situation to a certain degree right now with everything going on in the world. Um but what is this meme and and what does it actually mean to to monitor the situation?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Well, monitoring the situation is a meme that both originates and I think almost exclusively lives on Twitter. Um it is uh it was the the first coin coinage that is like commonly cited is a January 2025 tweet that uh has a picture of Jeff Bezos. Um he is uh at a uh Blue Origin launch event. He is uh in what looks to be a control room. He uh, you know, it has like those those sort sort of like graduated rows of seating um with like desks and computer monitors in front of them. Um he is in his jeans and a blue origin polo, his biceps are huge, like straining the sleeves. He is standing arms crossed at attention. He is staring into the distance, you cannot see what he's looking at. He is wearing um a headset with like a microphone arm. He looks serious, he looks locked in, he is monitoring the situation.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

He's looking awesome in the photo. Like let's be real. We we see so many of these photos of Elon Musk in the control room. You know, he he loves like, you know, looking like the man who's controlling the rocket launch and all this kind of stuff. He has never looked as cool as Jeff Bezos looks in this photo. Like, let's be real.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Yeah, Bezos looks like a man of action. He looks like a man who who is um is doing something important and who is like purely focused on it. Yeah, he looks he looks very serious, he looks very focused, he looks very masculine. And um the in the the text of the tweet reads, you know, the masculine urge to monitor the situation. And, you know, this this term sort of like, you know, it is it's like immediately recognizable as something that is used as part of like corporate speak, as as you know, public relations jargon, as something that sort of shows up in a lot of like official statements that uh to give uh the sort of the impression that that uh you were on top of things, your company, your organization, um, your office is is locked in, is paying attention, is as in control as they can possibly be of what's happening. Um and so the phrase sort of like began to bounce around Twitter after that. Um, and it and it sort of resurfaces, you know, six months later in another sort of spate of memes. Um and you see it sort of people attaching like particular types of imagery to it. Um you see like any ridiculous like computer setup with like 10 monitors and you know, um the room is dark, but the monitors are glowing, and you are it in them.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

You are sitting back in a chair and you just have like sort of this collection of monitors like arrayed over you almost in sort of like a wally situation, but you are what what immediately comes to mind is that scene in I think it's like the Dark Knight or Dark Knight Rises where like Batman is in front of that like big screen of it's not even like video feeds, it's like I don't know, I can't remember exactly what it's monitoring, but like that that is what comes to mind when you describe it as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Right. Right. Yeah. The um, you know, the the situation room with like a million different things on like a somehow clear glass background that you can still see what's happening. Um it's a it's a very cinematic, very evocative phrase, I think. It resurfaced again recently, um about a month ago when uh the United States uh in Israel began their um spate of attacks on Iran. Um and you really see uh it sort of go crazy from there. So for the past month, this this phrase has been sort of omnipresent. Um and you uh you get a lot of uh people making jokes about it, but then like the jokes become like take on like a bit of half joke, half serious, because the, you know, as is like clear at this point, the war in in Iran has had a um you know very serious effect on lots of sort of uh external indicators, price of oil, um, the overall US stock market, um, liquid natural gas uh markets, uh other commodities, all kinds of stuff. And you sort of layer this like really multifaceted uh crisis on top of like everything else that's going on. And um the idea of monitoring the situation, I think, uh sort of like meets its perfect uh confluence of events. Um and uh you really see it take off from there. And and it is, it has not slowed down. The uh the prediction market polymarket uh has been the the first like major company to sort of uh pick up the meme and run with it. Um a couple weekends ago, they did a like a pop-up uh bar event in DC, um, where they uh, you know, instead of showing sports on the first weekend of March Madness, they had a bunch of Bloomberg terminals pulled up. They had a bunch of live news feeds, a bunch of um social media feeds, uh, you know, uh prediction market odds uh moving in real time, things like that. So uh and that's another element of this as as well, is the this sort of dashboardification of regular people's uh uh media consumption online. Um, this idea that you know you're assembling your feeds, you're watching the stock market, you're watching maps of the straight-of-hormoes, you're watching uh, you know, different types of vessels move around the world, uh and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yeah. I feel like it also, you know, when you think of the meme and you think of the notion of this, right? Most of us have always wanted to be up to date on current events, right? But in the past, that would take a particular form. You know, you tune into the news, you read the newspaper, there was only so much information available to most people to actually understand what was going on. And it does feel like in this moment, like obviously we can take that route, you know, of reading a few media sources to understand what the latest updates are, but it also feels like there's this incentive or this drive, or you know, it's kind of expected that we are searching through all of these different sources in order to try to get our own picture of what is going on. You know, the the kind of old institutional sources of information are not as trusted anymore, and we need to like search them out ourselves. So it does really feel like of the moment in a sense, too, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Right. Um, for most of like modern media history, uh monitoring the situation was like a particular job that particular people had. Um and then if you were a member of the general public, um information about news and current events and global crises uh came to you in from like predictable sources and at predictable times. Like you'd get the newspaper in the morning, you'd watch the uh nightly news, you'd you know, uh get a a weekly news magazine, a time or a newsweek or a business week, um, something like that. So you your ability as like a like a regular person in the world to sort of like actively consume primary source information uh was sort of limited. Like there just weren't flows of information that worked like that that the average person had access to. That is one reason that, you know, the company I work for, Bloomberg, um, one reason that it's been around for so long, because it uh produces a an information flow um uh machine, the terminal that um allowed finance professionals to um check all kinds of um data and information in real time on their computers at a but in a time before that was really possible. As the internet has gotten more and more robust over the past, you know, uh 10 years, especially, um, checking real-time data uh is more and more possible and it's more and more omnipresent. And the something I talk about in the column is this the sort of logic of the feed. Social media has sort of trained people to expect like this sort of constant drip of information and updates and tips or cues on what you're supposed to be looking at at any particular time. So uh the the sort of desire to assemble feeds is uh something that I think we have all been sort of primed to do. And now that like, you know, I can go on Vessel Finder and see what types of ships are in the are are in New York Bay right now. I can go um, you know, to a lot to uh you know various uh commodities price trackers, I can assemble graphs myself, I can I can do all kinds of stuff. And and I think that that the sort of logic of the feed has um encouraged people to to sort of attempt to uh reassemble uh the sort of informational flows that used to be the province of like professionals who could per who were perhaps more able to evaluate the information for accuracy and usefulness and things like that. But we're just all we're just all uh full of feeds now.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah, we're all monitoring the feeds uh and and the situation happening on them. Um you know, on that point though, talking about the feeds, talking about how we're consuming this information. One of the things that I found really interesting in the piece that you wrote, and that I, you know, I've seen another a few other sources talking about uh since then is this attempt to create dashboards. You know, you talked about the the Bloomberg terminal, right? This is something very professional. This is something people pay a lot of money to get access to. Um, but people actually making dashboards with all of these different sources to, as you say, you know, monitor the situation. Can you talk about what we're seeing there? And like, is this a new development?

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah, um, I think it is a new-ish development. I think you saw a little bit of this sort of um dashboard assembly happening um during COVID, especially the early part of the pandemic when you know public data about case counts and about um, you know, uh wastewater uh detection levels and um how the how the virus was spreading around the world and through the country. Um, I think people sort of uh because it was a a crisis that sort of affected us all, implicated us all, people really wanted some sort of information about like how this awful disaster was um was evolving and and and spreading and and moving through uh, you know, physically and then like over time. Um so you saw um a lot of a lot of places sort of spin up tracker uh you know uh feed options uh for certain types of of public data that was being made made available daily or weekly for um for COVID cases. I worked at the Atlantic at the time and we uh some some coworkers of mine on on the science, tech and health desk um assembled some information feeds that like the uh Trump administration was not putting together at the time um by going to like state health, state health authorities. Uh so you saw this a little bit during COVID when people were trying to piece together data in a way that made this sort of like incomprehensible situation a little bit more comprehensible. Um, but I think that in the intervening few years since that was really a thing, the ability to uh create more sophisticated looking um dashboards has really expanded. Um I think that the uh approximate cause of that is probably cloud code and other sort of like vibe-coding AI software that has allowed people that don't have much expertise in like building information tools to sort of, you know, talk to an AI um chatbot and and get some help in putting together something that looks slick, that like uh, you know, works to pull in the data feeds that they're looking for, et cetera. So you see a lot of people assembling uh dashboards that way um in the past few weeks. Uh some of these dashboards have become quite popular. There's one called World Monitor that uh my former colleague at the Atlantic Charlie Wartzel spoke to the the guy who set it up and said he said that in the first, I think, 21 days that it was um that it was up and running, like more than two million people had used it. Um so you see these things being spun up very, very quickly in a way that like looks pretty sophisticated. Like they're they're able to do um a pretty good UI uh job at at pulling in these different feeds, and they pull in stock prices, you know, oil futures, liquid natural gas, they pull in um, you know, certain types of maps. Um you can get uh like a lot of uh you know vessel movement maps uh for the Strait of Hormuz, you can get um information about flight paths um for flights that are in the air. Um you can get uh, you know, sort of all kinds of stuff. The the maps of reported strikes throughout the Middle East. Um and then also a lot of times uh what these uh what these dashboards tend to include is just um also posts. Um You need the posts in there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is all posts, you know. Um this is uh it's all it all redounds to posts. Um so you get like headlines or you get um like intel pulled in, and basically that is just pulling from like um, you know, groups of like credible seeming guys on Twitter, um, credible seeming um, you know, uh posts that are about like US security or about uh you know a bunch of guys who are suddenly uh, you know, uh experts in in uh commodities, experts in how liquid natural gas is processed and moved across the world. Um so you get like sort of these decontextualized little um nuggets of of information from sources sort of unknown. Um and and this all sort of pulls together and you can sort of toggle between um different feeds. You can set up your standard feeds um into a dashboard. And and then there's a lot of like sort of weird metrics that show up in these dashboards that are not necessarily useful for anything. Um you get like a one to one to a hundred stability score of like the situation. You get um things like that, things that are not necessarily numbers or metrics or uh types of measurement that experts in these fields necessarily use, but they are sort of designed to provide a sense of context to uh the uh amateur situation monitor at home.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Yeah, I wonder what's going into the uh stability index and uh you know w w what is actually generating that number at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Aaron Powell Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Um I I was wondering, you know, one of the things that stood out to me in thinking about the way that people are consuming this information and searching for all this information is you know, in part like the conversations that we have been having for quite a while now about like open source intelligence and like, you know, that kind of community and how there seems to be a lot more attention on that in recent years, certainly since the war war in Ukraine, um, but you know, it it certainly wasn't something that only existed since then. It's been around for a long time. Is there any kind of overlap between that kind of like community, that's you know, uh, I guess group of discussions and what we're seeing with you know these dashboards and people searching out this information, or are they kind of two separate things?

SPEAKER_00 21:04

I think that there is some overlap here. I I think that the dashboards are sort of as as useful as your uh capacity to evaluate the information within them. Um, you know, if you're if they're pulling in accurate, you know, Brent Crew prices, if they're pulling in accurate maps of how um ships are moving in uh in or around the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, like that can all be useful. That can all be information that um that real serious people need and use to evaluate the process that's going on. And and I think that that can be um something that I think that you don't have to be like necessarily like credentialed or part of like a particular organization in order to be a person who is um smart enough to evaluate that information and to find that information useful. And um and I think that like the the open flow of information about conflicts is good. I think that we can see this with the um With the war in Gaza, I think that the global perception of that conflict is a lot different than it would have been if there weren't uh open source uh, you know, um ways of of learning about like what is happening there and getting primary sources and um you know having the you know the expertise of people who are who are real, not really genuinely knowledgeable about the field, but are not necessarily like institutionally associated with um you know uh the groups that are like allowed to to talk about like what is happening in one of these conflicts. So I think that like, you know, the I think tools in a lot of sense are sort of not necessarily value neutral, but I think that information and the flows of information can be used for good or for ill. And I think that like the capacity to find and evaluate this information as someone who is not necessarily, you know, institutionally associated is a valuable thing on balance, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And and I even feel like you know you brought up the war in Gaza. And even in that case, I still feel, and obviously it has changed a lot in the past couple of years, but that kind of like the narrative or opinion communicated by the media, certainly in Canada, I'm sure it's the case in the United States, is quite different from the public mood on what is happening, you know, what that we see indicated in polling and things like that. Um and those things haven't really caught up. And that is part of the reason, I think, why people have been seeking out that information in, say, social media and alternative news forms, because they're not getting it from those institutions that were that were traditionally more trusted and things like that, even though that has shifted in the in the past couple of years as well, right? As what is going on over there has become become undeniable, you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Right. I think that that the sort of like disconnect that people often feel with current events and like what they can see with their own eyes of like first-person video and and things like that, versus the way that institutional media and institutional groups decide to speak to the general public about those things. I think that there's, you know, and this goes well beyond um Gaza. I think that I think it makes people more likely to seek out these sort of aggregated primary-ish sources because there is like a general distrust, some of it earned, some of it sort of um astroturfed, of like institutional and and establishment narratives about a lot of world events, about conflicts, about um things that uh people perceive and uh often rightly so to be deleterious to their well-being, to the well-being of other people around the world, to the general stability of their lives. Um, and I think that the combination of that general feeling of distrust and mismatch between official narrative and uh experience and uh personal perception, uh, and uh all this information being more and more available to um sort of gather on your own online, um, I think that this is just sort of a logical outgrowth of all of that.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, right? And as I'm hearing you talk about that, and you know, as we're discussing it, I'm thinking on the one hand about how there are very real reasons to be seeking out this information, to want to double check what is going on, uh, to be looking for, as you're saying, you know, more primary sources that are able to share their experiences, their expertise, their knowledge, maybe even their people who are on the ground and you're being able to hear things firsthand in a way that you might not if you were just tuning into the CNN or something like that. But then on the other, on the flip side of that, you know, with all of that information, I wonder if you know there is kind of like an overwhelm or why we feel like we need to be seeking out so much information and checking so much and whether because the information is there, we're taking a step too far in trying to like consume everything and that just becomes a bit too much.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

I think that this is very much like a double-sided coin. On the one hand, the the free flow of um you know first-person information, primary sources is um good, is is like a like an inarguable good in in the general world and people wanting to be informed about the world they live in. I think that the downside of that is that because the general public often doesn't know what to make of a lot of these, even if the information is accurate, which is like itself, you know, not a not a given uh by any stretch of the imagination. I think that because a lot of uh people are just, you know, you look at oil prices, you look at maps of ships moving around the world, you look at um headlines about liquid natural gas processing facilities, and you are probably just a regular person who does not have like a real sense of uh how any of that affects you, how any of that affects gas prices, how any of that affects um the you know general global stability. Um I think that it can, you know, it can keep you sort of like locked into those feeds. It can, it can draw you further and further into trying to find more and more information to try to make things make sense, um, to try to find um, you know, somebody who feels trustworthy, who feels knowledgeable, who can explain this to you. And I think that that can, you know, um suck people in, it can make people feel overwhelmed, it can, it can really, I think, start to harm people's mental health, honestly, not to be like jeezy about it, but I I think that it is um it is easy to get overwhelmed. It is easy to feel like things are spiraling out of control and you don't have a sense of what's happening. It's easy to um read a couple headlines, not really understand what they mean and catastrophize. It is easy to um sort of become one with your phone, one with your feeds. And that is like the, you know, the logic, that is like the logic of the feed. That is what these um social media systems uh platforms have like set us up to do, set us up to feel like, you know, if we just read a couple more posts, that, you know, just refresh again, that the post that that explains it all, that solves the problem is coming. You just have to stay locked in. And I think that this sort of like continuous drip of little bits of information about a global crisis, too complex and too multifaceted even for experts to really say anything concrete about, the average person trying to deal with that information, even if it's accurate, can be, I I think, really overwhelming and really deleterious to uh, you know, someone's like day-to-day um mental state. Because like there's, you know, you can refresh the feed as many times as you want. There's no post coming that is going to that is going to drop everything that you know into place and make it fully make sense and make you feel like you have some measure of control. And I think that that's what a lot of this is is about for a lot of like regular people who are not like, you know, black pilled, you know, prediction market addicts, um, is just feeling like you have like, you know, the world is a big, scary place um right now, forever. It is, it is there there's a lot going on that that is terrible that you can't get your arms around no matter how you hard you try. Um, and I think the sense that like if you just try a little harder, if you just read a few more posts, if you just like get one more get your feet a little more dialed in, that it can feel sort of like you have a sense of control, that you have a sense of participation at least. And I I think that that sort of like chasing that dragon is is not going to be satisfying ever. Um it is gonna keep you engaged though.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, absolutely. Like it feels like you know, listening to what you're saying, that it kind of provides like a false sense of agency. It's like, oh, because I have access to all this information that now I have some degree of power or influence or control over the events that are affecting my life when really that's that's very unlikely to be the case, unfortunately, because these things are such large forces, you know, that are well beyond in many cases, uh maybe even a president of the United States control. But you know, he's obviously causing a lot of the problems now as well. Uh if he wasn't bombing a country, we we wouldn't be having oil shocks and things like that, right? Um but then on the the kind of other side of that, right? I guess there's there's that agency, but you are also talking about the engagement and how it can kind of warp your perceptions and things like that. And you know, obviously we're all watching a war play out in front of our eyes, and you know, we've been watching a genocide play out for the past few years, but I feel like you know, you can even think about it in much more mundane ways. You know, I talk to people and you know, this is this is reflected in the data as well, that you know, because they're getting all this information through, say, Facebook or certain other platforms, they end up feeling that their communities are less safe because it's you know focused on, you know, if you think of things like next door or you know, the ring doorbell videos that go around, and people end up feeling that they live in a far less safe community than they actually do, then the numbers show, then the reality of the lived experience would suggest. And you know, that can extend to so many other parts of society, right? Even just people thinking that the world in general is a more dangerous and scary place than it is in reality if you are out kind of living in it and experiencing it. And I feel like that is kind of connected to what you're saying, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Right, absolutely. I think that, you know, not all information is equally useful to every person. There is information that you need to have to be like an informed citizen, to make certain choices in your day-to-day life, to understand how the uh actions of your government affect the lives of people overseas, to understand how, you know, American Empire functions, to understand, you know, it's good to understand oil markets. It's good to understand um how global logistics works on like sort of a basic level. It is, it is good to understand how your life and well-being is linked up to the to the well-being of people uh you'll never meet and places you'll never go. Um it is, it is, I think, sort of uh fundamentally valuable to um to know all of those things. To know how they are changing on a minute-by-minute level, on a even like a day-by-day level, is not, I think, useful to most people. Like it is, it is not information that you have the um that you have the context and capacity to um to put to use in a healthy, a healthy, uh, active way. Um, you know, it is it is not something that that the average person um is going to find helpful in their understanding of their everyday life. And it can be, and and when you have a lot of information, but not a lot of capacity to process it or understand it or contextualize it yourself, that is like a um a target-rich environment for bad actors. Um, that is a target-rich environment for people who are trying to warp your understanding of reality through warping your understanding of what that information means. I think that that is the sort of downside of the of the, you know, sort of constant drip of information we have access to about everything now. I think that that is um that because so many people have so many people want to feel like they are participating in their lives, so many people want to feel like they are participating in what their government is doing, that they are understanding um how what these actions beyond their control mean for actions within their control. Um and and I think that because there is this sort of desperation to that desire to consume this information, because there is that desperation to like find the post that explains it all, to find the metric that explains it all, to um to figure out how to understand what is available to you, that is that that that is where things go really, really awry for some people. Um, because like, you know, the uh media has, you know, I've got my criticisms of institutional media, um, but one of the things that it's very good at is having people that are subject matter experts on understanding um information that comes in and understanding what is useful to disseminate to the public, what is not useful to disseminate to the public, what means something, what means nothing. Not all information is inherently meaningful, and it's not all inherently meaningful to um every audience or every person. So the ability to sort of like um, you know, gather information, contextualize it, and give it to people in a in a way that um makes it make sense, even if you're not a subject matter expert, is like a really uh important responsibility of media. And it is a sort of mode of operation that's easy to play act, um, that is easy to sort of adopt these signifiers of um of uh reliability, of um, you know, uh factualness and to uh fool a lot of people in the process um because they don't have the the context, the expertise to look at what you're telling them and go, you're full of shit. Um, this is not what that means. This is, you know, um it is easy to lie to people who don't know what information means, but who feel like they are empowered to understand things because they do have like this sort of raw information. Um and I think that that is something that we see happening like across the internet. Like, um, and you know, it is not necessarily I I think the situation in in Iran, the, you know, whatever misinformation merchants are out there doing with what is available right now, I don't I don't see it yet causing any particular sort of like pattern of like radicalization or, you know, people breaking off into like the sort of weird ideological subsets that you get with some types of catastrophes that are that that generate like a QAnon or something like that. Um But I I do think that like I wonder what will happen with that because this is such an environment that is that is so ripe to take advantage of people's um desperation to understand.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

Yeah, definitely. Uh I I think you're completely spot on with that, right? And I think it's something that we always need to be like aware of and thinking about. And I feel like, you know, when you talk about the role that media can do, you know, some of the media that I read the most and that that I pay the most attention to is actually like kind of like the financial and business media, because it's like, I don't know, you know, people running companies need accurate information on what's happening. And so like the Financial Times and Bloomberg are like some of the sources that I go to most often, which is not to say that there aren't other sources that I rely on too, but it's like they're probably the media organizations I read some of the most of, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Yeah. And it's interesting you say that. That's one of the reasons that I decided to come to Bloomberg two years ago, is because I think that financial media is interesting in that like the people who pay for it, the people who subscribe are people who really want accurate information, because, you know, uh capital, of course, has ideology and has um a belief system that is not necessarily always based in reality. Um, but if you're trading on financial markets, if you are, um if your job is h heavily tied to um, you know, what particular companies are up to, um what particular financial institutions are up to, what particular what what is happening with you know commodities, like you have to live in reality. You have to to live um in a world where like the actual facts and what they mean matters. And I think that like before I um started working um in financial media, I I read a lot of FT. I read a lot of Bloomberg because those um, if I was researching a story on something else, like I knew that those sources would have reliable information because the people who pay for them um require it.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like it in the US context, like obviously Financial Times is the UK, but owned by a Japanese company, that uh you know, Bloomberg doesn't have the same maybe objectionable ideological tilt as the Wall Street Journal. Uh and so you know, that's what I uh that's what I rely on more. But I I feel like when you're talking about that and and all of that, what it also brought to mind is I feel like for me, like I'm probably the least tuned in that I have been in a number of years. In part that's just because like, you know, the past nine or so months I've been working on my book and I haven't had the capacity to take in the amount of information that I would have in the past. And so, like, you know, when I when I read your column, it was the first I had ever heard of these vibe-coded dashboards. And like usually I feel like that was something I would have been aware of, you know, much earlier on. And I was like, did I really miss out by not knowing about that before? Like, I don't think so, but I still think it's really interesting now that I do know about it. And I kind of encounter this, you know, I'm not on Twitter anymore. I don't, I don't post on Twitter. And really, much of last year, I still wasn't using it, even though I wasn't like officially off and whatnot. And I feel like some of the discussions I have with people now, when I'm like, yeah, but like why not get off of it? One of the most common things I hear is like, yeah, but that's where you know you get uh the breaking news events and and the posts about breaking news when it's happening. And at least for me, like I believe it, you know, I'm I'm not denying that it's that it's a reality, but for me, I'm like, I don't know, I think I'm doing just fine. Like maybe I don't need that degree of like granularity in you know, the kind of minute-by-minute updates on what is happening in a particular event. You know, uh as you say, I'll read an article, I'll, you know, watch some news report from you know a certain news organization that I trust. If there's something really big, it'll kind of find its way on the blue sky, most likely, or if not, I'll find it somewhere else. I don't, I I feel like in the past I would have been one of these people who are like, I need to know every little bit. And I feel like in the past six or so months, it's like I've become not so much of that person. Yeah, it's like, do I Yeah, and and and my response has not been like, I need that more, but actually, how do I retreat from it even further and not have this like constant drip of information that's like distracting me from other things? Uh I don't know how you feel about that, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah. Um, something, you know, some occasionally a post will go around around Twitter or Blue Sky that's like, what is one thing about your profession that is widely understood within it, but that people outside of it don't seem to understand? And one of the good ones for journalism is that breaking news reporting is often wrong. Um, you know, and this has been true forever. This was this is not the situation where it's like, um, you know, the day of reports in newspapers um 50 years ago were all pristine and we have been irrevocably corrupted by the internet in that way. But like breaking news reporting is has been uh um in exact science the entirety of its existence. Getting things right um immediately, um, when like there is still so much information about anything um to be uncovered is impossible. Like it is, you know, the process of of uncovering information takes time, um, even when you have like a live event. So I I think that people, again, I I feel really strongly that this is a desire to feel a sense of agency in your everyday life because like when you have access to so much information, you there begins to be this like fundamental psychological mismatch between like how much you know and what you can do about it. And this was not as bad of a problem when information was um more gate kept. And like there are also downsides to information being more gate-kept, but one thing it provided you was uh information in ways that like it was that were designed for you as a regular person and not a subject matter expert to consume that made them make sense and contextualize them, contextualized them for like who you are generally, um, you know, where you are in in the country, in the world, um, you know, what your assumed level of knowledge about um something technical is, things like that. So the more that there is like a um disconnect between your ability to um to use information to have some sort of agency and your ability to have information, I think that there is this like fundamental like psycho psychological psychological stress to that. The tension is just too on the present. You know so many things, you can't do anything. Um, and that is like irritating the people. And so I think that like understanding that you are in a situation where like a lot of the information you're getting isn't good information. And a lot of the, I mean, honestly, a lot of the analysis you're getting also isn't good because a lot of people, um, you know, there's somebody's an economics expert one week, they are a constitutional law expert the next week, they are a commodities trader the the week after that. Like um, there are people who have huge platforms that are just there for engagement on whatever the top topic to shore is, that is uh the job they have set up for themselves. So you are um you're getting um a lot of information, you're getting a lot of analysis of variable quality, and you still can't do anything. You're still just like a normal person who is living, you know, in whatever town you live in, going to your job, trying to, you know, uh, you know, provide for your family, trying to make sure your kids do their homework, whatever. Um, and uh I think that realizing that that causes you stress and perhaps does not always uh pay you any particular dividends, and then acting on that realization is like a healthy thing for most people. Because if you read the story two days later that has all of the information and that has all of the videos embedded in it that are um, you know, authenticated videos that are actually show what happened, that can tell you um, you know, who dropped that bomb, um, what was the facility that it hit, et cetera, or whatever it is for the news story that you're interested in, I think that that is like probably a less stressful but no less informed way to interact with that information. Um, it means that you have to identify uh news sources that uh do what you want them to do for you, whether that's mainstream news, whether that is independent journalists, uh, whoever it is, you have to do like a little bit of groundwork to um to find those news sources that are giving you the types of analysis and information that you value. Um and then you have to be able to stop yourself from just constantly reloading that feed and giving you, you know, that that sort of like momentary hit of like, I'm in control. I am I am part of this event, I am part of, you know, I am one of the protagonists of reality. I am here experiencing it with everybody else. I am in the the arena. Um, because like you're not, you're on your phone. Um we're all we're mostly we're all just on our phone.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

Totally. Unfortunately, right? Um yeah. I I feel like with what you're saying, like it resonates so much with how I feel. Like I know that I'm missing out on little details as they come out. And I know and I have no problem with the fact that I'm missing out on internet beefs because I really don't care. And I feel like there are so many people now who I have no idea who they are, and I'm completely content not knowing who they are, but I don't feel less informed. Like I still know what is going on. I have, as you're saying, I have the sources that I know I can trust. I, you know, go to my financial press when I need that. And I also see that, like, uh, you know, when it comes to say the reporting on Gaza, I or even what's happening in Iran now, I turn a lot to Al Jazeera, I turn a lot to Channel 4 news in the UK, which I find is really good for those sorts of things. And then of course, I can pay attention to what is going on in other US media, other media in different areas, recognizing that maybe I'm getting a certain part of the story there and I'm getting another part of the story from a different source. And, you know, hopefully I can kind of bring that together and come to an understanding based on that, but it's not based on like all these little pieces that I'm trying to put together with no context at all, you know?

SPEAKER_00 46:01

Right, right. And I think that like the skilled labor of um of aggregating and contextualizing information is valuable. I I'm not just saying that because I'm one of the people who does it, but I think that that if you are a person who has other things to attend to in life, um, I think it is it is valuable to farm out some of that understanding to uh sources that you have evaluated and decided you can trust. And I think that, you know, having multiple sources and having multiple points of view on on uh major important events is valuable. But like you can, to a certain extent, like once you've done that legwork of deciding um what you think is is valuable and trustworthy, you can sort of set it and forget it. You do not have to be, you know, right there alongside the people who who are tasked with um, you know, gathering and presenting that information. You do not have to be doing it with them. You are not getting paid. Um, you have another job. And I'm sure whatever your other job is is valuable. And we want those of us who do that work want you to concentrate on it because we're not capable of doing whatever that is.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Um totally. I'm completely with you. And I wanted to, you know, before we start to wrap up our conversation, I wanted to talk about one other angle of this, right? That that comes up in your story and that you brought up earlier as well. You know, we're in this information environment where there's so much coming at us, and obviously there are a lot of huge events happening as well. But this also comes at a moment where we've had the, I guess like the deregulation of gambling in the United States and many other uh countries, you know, Western countries certainly. And that has kind of brought up these platforms like Polymarket and Calchi that are leading people to bet on a whole load of things now. You know, I feel like we saw, I feel like it's kind of like obviously we had this crypto moment a few years ago where there was a lot of kind of speculative money going into coins and NFTs and all this kind of stuff. And now it's like the betting has moved away from scam financial products or whatever into information and trying to figure out what's going on. And I wonder what you make of how everything we have been talking about intersects with the rise of these platforms, especially in the past couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

Yeah, I think that the um the deregulation of gambling is something that we will look back on as a society and and wonder why we did that.

SPEAKER_01 48:27

Oh my God, I 100% agree.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Yeah, it's like, was that the best idea we ever had? Probably not. I I think that like it's sort of a logical outgrowth of this idea that you have a lot of information, but not a lot of control, not a lot of agency. So if you have all of this information, but you can't like stop your nation's government from bombing a uh, you know, a girls' elementary school, you can't stop um, you know, a lot of things from happening. You don't have that type of agency. It's like, well, how do you express some sort of control? How do you express some sort of agency? How do you um derive some sort of benefit from being locked in, from monitoring the situation, from from having all of these dashboards, from pulling your second monitor out of work from home storage and setting it up and getting your um getting your feeds dialed in? Like like how do you if you are a person with information in search of control, gambling has to look like um has to look like a big opportunity for you. Um, because something that gambling sort of exploits is uh the sense that is your individual sense that you know more than you do. Um, and that you that you have more of a an advantage than you actually do. Um, that you watch enough football to understand who is likely to score a touchdown in in this weekend's game, that you understand who is likely to um hit this particular pitcher who um your baseball team is is um starting in the next game. Like um, and when you turn that sort of like uh overwrought sense of expertise and sense of understanding out into the news environment in general, if you're someone who just like cannot get off your phone and you know all of this, or you feel like you know all of this stuff, or you have all this information that you don't really have a chance to contextualize, why not place some bets? Why not, why not look at yourself and go, I'm backing me. I have done all this research, I have done all this reading, I have set up my feeds, I have my second monitor going, you know, I haven't talked to my kids in weeks.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Um you have a vision pro on your face in that uh environment as well.

SPEAKER_00 50:39

Yeah, yeah. You're just you're just you know, you're in the extra bedroom, you have your you have your setup going, um, you uh your wife is mad at you. Um the kids, the kids do not call you dad anymore, but like you But you know it all. But you know it all. You have your feeds, you have um, you know, the steady drip of information, and you feel like because you have consumed all of this information, you should be able to draw some conclusions. So, what is going to reward you for drawing the correct conclusions? Um, it's certainly not like your day job or your personal relationships, but like maybe, you know, you put some money on what you think is gonna happen um with, you know, a ground invasion of Iran. What do you think is gonna happen with Karg Island? What you think is gonna happen um with, you know, TSA uh in the US, with um funding DHS. Like you look for places where it feels like you can exert some control. Um and even if that's just putting a thousand bucks on, you know, ground troops into Iran before March 31st, um, then maybe that's as good as it gets for you, maybe that is much as much control as it feels like you can have. But it feels like something that you can do with the information you've gathered, um with your with your um, you know, uh dedication to knowing things as they happen to the best of your ability. So I think that, you know, it makes perfect sense that PolyMarket was the um was the company to sort of like adopt the monitoring, the situation meme first, because like uh prediction markets are basically like a derivatives market on reality. Um they are um, you know, uh someplace to do financial arbitrage on current events. So if you really think that you are more locked in, more um, you know, uh abreast of the situation than 99% of the population, then it starts to feel like you are leaving money on the table, not to like put some money on on um what you think is gonna happen um with some of these things that you've spent so much time um absorbing numbers about um and absorbing like sort of dubious Twitter analysis of. So, like, why not? And that is, I mean, that's the same logic of sports gambling. I am a I am a huge football fan. I have sports gambled on on football before. I have made a decent bit of money. I am not bad at it. But I stopped doing it after a while because you know, the lines get more efficient over time. The more information you give to the sports books, the more they get good at beating you. And, you know, so for the first six months it was legal. I had a little fun with it. And then it was like, no, I don't, I'm not actually an expert. Like, like I am, I'm gonna take the my my you know, 500 bucks or whatever that I ended up up and I am going to go. But like a lot of people have a hard time doing that. And, you know, these uh betting markets, whether they're for sports or or uh other things, are designed to make you have a hard time doing that. Um, I'm lucky that I was able to psychologically go, not for me anymore. Um, I'm I'm gonna cash out because like so many people are just um sort of hounded by these things and hounded by the desire to go back to the table, metaphorically. And when you're in an environment where there's such like a mismatch between information and your personal agency, I can see why that is tempting for a lot of people because like what else are you gonna do with the fact that you spend eight hours a day on your phone?

SPEAKER_01 53:58

Yeah, definitely. And I I think it's really good that you were able to like be able to pull yourself away from that and like not feel the desire to go back. I remember like one of my like kind of formative memories of gambling was I I was young, like probably like a young teenager or something, and I was with an uncle of mine, and he put $20 into a VLT and we were up to $70. And I was like, let's take it out. Like, we've made this money, like this is great. You can put the $20 back in, like then we got $50. But no, he like had to keep like using the machine until there was nothing left. And I was like, this is wild. We had all that money and now it's gone, you know? And now it's gone. Exactly. And so yeah, I I I completely get what you're saying. And like it's it's grim to hear that, but also like not surprising again, especially like when you are pushed to do these things by these companies who have particular incentives, they want to drive engagement. Obviously, they want to get you to be betting on, you know, whatever they can get you to bet on because they're making money off of it. And it really just shows how like the whole environment, the whole infrastructure of like the world that we interact with is created for these incentives that are like so beyond what is good for any of us, I guess, you know? And I I guess I just wonder like to wind down our conversation, like, where do you think things go from here? Are we able to find a better balance? Or is this just going to be something that we kind of individually have to try to figure out?

SPEAKER_00 55:27

I hope that there are regulatory solutions in our future. Um I don't think, I don't, I don't think age verification is it. Um I know that that's something that that a lot of politicians um want to talk, want to talk about and want to implement now. I I do not think that is a good idea broadly on anything. I don't know exactly what what the other regulatory options would be. I think that there is just like a market uh an argument to be made made from a legal perspective. And I'm not a lawyer, but this is just the sense that I get um that Cal Shi and Polymarket are just illegal betting markets and should not be operating in the US. You know, when I was in college, I remember my freshman year, um there was a, this was back in the mid-2000s. So it was we all had laptops, but we didn't have like sort of universal Wi-Fi. Um, and not everybody had like a great laptop. Uh so there was a computer lab in the first floor of my um dorm building. And uh for a lot of the, you know, my freshman year in college, like you'd go in and out and there would be guys playing um, you know, online poker um on those computers, just hanging out. And then the US government turned that switch off. Um, and it really did just go away. Crazy.

SPEAKER_01 56:38

You can do that. What?

SPEAKER_00 56:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it was just regulated out of existence. And like the the uh the sort of like ambient visibility of video poker just like didn't exist anymore. You didn't see people doing that anymore. It was it was like they flipped a switch. Um, and I have to think that there has to be some sort of regulatory um possibility of doing that with these prediction markets, because I do think that they sort of do a little bit of arbitrage on our sort of corroded information environment. Um, and in a way that is like probably not healthy for people. So there's that. I'm I'm not sure what to do about the rest of it. I'm not sure what to do about the sort of like the sense that like we have a lot of information and most people don't know how to contextualize it, don't know how to understand what it is they're looking at, um, because that is uh beyond beyond you know the uh prediction markets, that is like fertile ground for bad actors. Um and I don't know how you fix that except with a um you know a robust media apparatus that is responsive to um the demands of the general public and um responsive to uh you know good standards of factuality and uh ideological unbiasedness and things like that. I don't know um how that works out. But if you're able to, if if it's in the cards for you, paying for media um is is one of the best things that you can do. Um and that doesn't mean necessarily like subscriptions to big media organizations, although some, you know, if you find one valuable, go ahead and subscribe. Um but that means, you know, podcasts, that means newsletters, independent independent media. Um, most um major uh and and medium-sized cities in the US, I think, have a local media organization or two that is that is trying to do good, rigorous, responsible, community-based reporting um that might be, you know, more your speed than uh the whatever local newspaper is owned by Gannett or by Alden um Global Capital. Um if you can uh you know throw a couple bucks someone's way that is doing work that you find valuable and that you find rigorous, then that is uh that is a great step toward um sort of beating some of this back, I think. And but then also like once you find your um the sources that are valuable to you and that give you what you what you need, try to get off your phone a little bit. Don't don't monitor the situation. Trust if there are journalists you trust, media organizations you trust, then um trust them. Set it and forget it. Let it go. Um and uh try to live in the world with the people around you. Try to live in your community, try to live, try to do things that are beneficial um for the your community with your time instead of looking at your phone. And I know that that's like, you know, we should all probably be doing better at that than we are. But I I think that if you feel overwhelmed right now, the best thing you can do is put your phone down. Um, read a book, go volunteer at a local um organization that helps your unhoused neighbors pay for a uh, you know, other independent media that you read on your laptop and not on your phone. Um make the internet a thing that you go to instead of a thing that you live on.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:10

I I'm with you so much. Like even pick up a magazine or something, you know, if you want to catch up on things that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:15

Um I took a long flight recently and um like an 11 and a half hour flight. And and I didn't do this on purpose, but I I brought like some books and some magazines that had piled up that I hadn't had a chance to read uh because I I like print media. I um subscribed to a bunch of print magazines and I did the entire 11 and a half hour flight without listening to a podcast and without you know scrolling my feeds too much. Like I just I I read a New York magazine basically cover to cover. There was a lot of fascinating stuff in there that like I probably wouldn't click on the link, but like when it was hold it there in my hand, it looked interesting. And I read a couple graphs and I kept going. They're you know uh different ways of consuming information provide different things for you psychologically and intellectually that are worth pursuing and over whatever is happening on your phone.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Uh I I'm completely with you. But my my I'm not a I'm not like a movie watcher on planes, and I find it so wild like seeing so many people like glued to the screen on the I I I like read, I do work, you know, all depending, but it's like reading, working, listening to music is like my my plain adventure, you know. Um, but I'm I'm completely with you, right? You know, we need better funding of media. Uh we need to be looking at regulatory options, ban those betting platforms for a start, but maybe also looking at, you know, design solutions rather than age limits on the social media platforms to address some of the ways that they've designed their platforms in in harmful ways. And, you know, we're starting to see lawsuits on that front and things like that. But then also, you know, cut your screen time, you know, get off the phone a bit. Uh I love it. I I think that's the approach. You know, certainly we need to know what's going on with the situation. Maybe we don't need to monitor the situation as closely uh as we're often encouraged to do. Amanda, always fantastic to chat with you. Really enjoyed having you back on the show. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Of course. Anytime. I love I always love chatting with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:08

Amanda Mo is a Bloomberg Business Week senior reporter and writes the buying power column. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, PowerSmarks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own to help us hit our goal of 100 new supporters for the show's sixth birthday. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.