From WXXI news.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made on January 24th, 1994, in the final minute of NBC's today show.

The show had just posted their email address for the first time, and anchors Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric were struggling to understand what that meant.

Gumbel said it seemed to have something to do with the internet and then he asked, what is internet?

Anyway, it led to this exchange.

Internet is, that massive computer network, the one that's becoming really big now.

What do you mean, that's big?

How does one it.

What do you write to it?

Like mail?

No, a lot of people use it and communicate.

It's.

I guess they can communicate with NBC writers and producers.

Alison.

Can you explain what internet is in those days?

Well, the internet could have been anything.

Back in the 1990s, many people were hopeful that the internet would bring new opportunity, and not just for a select few companies or individuals.

It would be the opening of opportunity to people who could now compete and thrive.

It would lead to a better served public, a better informed public who had more information at their fingertips than ever before.

Somewhere along the way, Tim Wu writes, things went wrong.

The early dreams for the internet gave way to the reality.

A whole lot of concentrated power, growing inequality and a general public that is more anxious, more lonely, and pretty poorly informed.

How did we get here?

Tim Wu is a Columbia Law School law professor.

He's written several previous books about technology and the law.

He worked in the Biden administration as the special assistant to the president for Technology and competition policy on the National Economic Council.

He got 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor back in 2014.

Coming in second to Kathy Hochul, he coined the phrase net neutrality.

He's one of the leading voices in the conversation about how to regulate big tech, or whether to regulate big tech.

And his newest book is an argument that we've allowed Big tech to become too concentrated, extracting too much wealth and stealing too much of our time.

Today, Tim Wu was giving a public lecture at SUNY Geneseo.

It's the 2026 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo.

Happening at 430 this afternoon at Doty Recital Hall.

It is free and open to the public.

But first, he's our guest on Connections.

Tim, welcome.

Thank you for being here.

Oh, it's so great to be here.

Thank you for having me.

So if you go back to the 1990s, when people were asking, what is internet?

That was amazing.

Have you not heard that clip before?

You honestly never.

I've never.

And that it's, I don't know who founded.

That's an amazing.

Well, I think that's a good one.

So what should we have done differently?

What if we had taken a different fork in the road?

That would have led to a very different sort of usage and experience with the internet.

What might it have looked like over the last three decades?

It's a great question.

Part of my books message is that structure is destiny.

And we really were hoping in the 90s and early thousands that just like good vibes would carry us through what things could have looked like.

In my view, it's a little more like Wikipedia still is.

You think about Wikipedia.

It has, you know, huge amounts of traffic.

Back then it was about equal to Google.

Jimmy Wales, who ran Wikipedia, was a little older and the other guys and he's like, if we accept advertising, become commercial and hope will still be good, it's never going to work.

And so he just you know for went.

And I think if we really believed what we said back then we needed to make a lot more stuff.

Nonprofit actually frankly like NPR or PBS like structure it differently and not hope you can have a for profit company and they'll just have good vibes.

So we're going to talk about why you write in the book about the ways that you think it has not only been too much concentrated power, but also doesn't serve the public well.

There's a term that I can't use on the air here, but I'll use the term in crap ification.

And we're going to talk about what that means.

We'll get there but a little bit about yourself.

I mean, I was telling Tim for the hour, I mean, to me, he's an old fashioned Brandeis trust buster.

And I want to ask if you think there is any spirit of trust busting in the federal government today, is there?

I think, Senator Warren, perhaps I'm trying to think of others who might be in that category.

Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders.

Sanders.

And I think there's actually a dedicated minority of people, frankly, I think across the board, even bipartisan.

Lee, there's a lot of people who think there's too much concentrated power and things are out of balance.

And I guess, I mean, across the country, politician wise, is a very different story.

You know, I think it's a good example where the elected politicians don't do what most people want.

Well, that's that's an interesting way of looking at it because take Facebook for example.

So I want to listen to a clip that Mark Zuckerberg, of Mark Zuckerberg talking recently, meta CEO of course.

And in the clip, some of the background is he's talking about where AI is taking us, but he's also basically saying we're trying to give the public with the public wants.

We're just trying to give you a better life.

We're trying to make things easier for you.

And in this clip he's talking about in the next five years, how AI is going to transform your life and just basically take over tasks, and you can outsource a lot of what you do to it.

Let's listen.

So that I think is a real that's a real thing for for privacy and security and trust.

And if you're going to have an agent that knows a lot about you, which I would guess pretty much we all are going to have that.

I mean, I think you fast forward five years, like, everyone is going to have an agent that really intimately understands your goals and everything around you.

And, it can help you get stuff done.

In five years, we're all going to have an agent that knows almost everything about us and can help us get stuff done.

My first reaction to that was, I don't want that.

I know a lot of people who don't want that, and I don't know why Mark Zuckerberg thinks that we want that.

But you can hear in the clip, part of the reason he's saying that is he's being asked about, well, is doesn't I already steal too much of your data?

Are we actually protected?

And he's basically saying, well, that's going to be good for you because they're going to get to know you so well that they'll just do everything for you.

Take me through what you hear when you hear that clip.

Well, I hear the same mistakes that were made in the early thousands are the same promises, shall we say, which is, the promises that we're going to make you better off focused on you, when in fact, there's another set of masters being served.

You know, Scripture says you can only serve one master at once.

And if you look at the history of, say, Facebook, yes, they wanted to connect you with your friends and family, but they also wanted money from advertisers, and they also wanted to keep you on the site indefinitely, get you addicted, stuck to it.

So, you know, if they truly somehow were a charity or something that was creating robots that would serve you would be one thing.

But the what they want, frankly, is capture, frankly, is dependance and then dependance in such a way that you can you can be harvested as the resource.

In reading some of the criticism of your book, such as there is some, it generally says Tim was not giving people enough agency.

People do not have to give meat of their time.

They do not have to give Facebook their time.

They do not have to be on their phone all day.

They don't have to be addicted to this tech.

And there's a lot of personal choice here being misrepresented as you are captured or your attention has been extracted from you as if you don't have a say in it.

What do you say to that?

I'd say structure is destiny.

You know, we've created in an environment where it's like living in a casino and like, maybe your willpower is strong.

Maybe you can, you know, walk through a casino every single day and never think, hey, maybe I'll put a bet down and win this time.

But you know, the structure, the environment is designed to make you lose.

And so I don't know why.

We've created a life where you have to have the willpower, like incredible willpower to overcome temptations in every life.

Otherwise you fall into addiction.

I mean, and not only in tech world, like, you know, you can become drug addict, you become in debt, you become like a million different things.

We've set up society centered on this theory of willpower that requires, like Greek God like willpower to resist every temptation.

And actually, the Greek gods weren't good at that either.

There's a lot of a lot of myths and good lessons about that.

My 14 year old was asking me this morning, why did I hear LeBron James doing a Kalki ad?

He said.

He said LeBron James is like a billionaire.

Why does he need to be on the Kalsi payroll?

Or maybe it was probably market fact.

Check me on that one producer.

It's one of them.

I mean, I get the two mixed up, but he was going, isn't that isn't that stuff bad for people?

And I said, yeah, I think it is.

I do think the betting markets are not good for people in general, and I don't know why LeBron James needs to be on the payroll of that other than, he is a wealthy person.

He is in league with other wealthy, powerful people.

And this is sort of a new way to sort of extract from people.

I don't think LeBron James is right.

Like, I would tell you, Tim, that I want to be in league with people who are just extracting.

I think it's just where business interests are here.

So what do you see there with the way that people are now behaving again, your critics are going to say, you don't have to get out of Polly Market, you don't have to be on Facebook.

You don't have to be on that.

Well, I would say first, I'm a big believer in human agency and in my own life.

I kind of think it's really important to make your own decisions.

But we have set up an environment which is rigged for most people to fail, and gambling is a great example.

I mean, normalization of gambling, which actually was, gambling is banned by the New York State Constitution originally.

And then we created all these exceptions, is a recognition of the fact that, you know, people are bad at controlling themselves when faced with enormous temptations.

And, you know, it's one thing when you have to drive to a casino, that was it was tough.

Having it everywhere is just going to ruin lives.

You know, it's just going to ruin people's lives because we are valuable.

We are human.

And yes, we make choices.

And I completely agree with that and think it's important.

But I get back to this point is why do we set ourselves up to fail?

Well, so your book kind of in many ways, and I want to talk coming up here about five steps toward autocracy.

I want to talk about, you know, the real perils that you see in front of us, and not least of which I do want to ask you about, you know, your general thoughts about AI.

But we'll come back to that in a second.

When Zuckerberg is talking about the way that we behave and the way that we're going to outsource some of our our lives to AI, it to me has echoes of your book that says he wants you to feel like you need it, right.

He need you to feel like you have to have these products.

Yes.

Would you agree with that?

Yes.

I mean, I think competition in our time has become less about better quality products, whatever, and more about who can best kind of capture a dependency where you need these products and you're you're loyal to them.

And I think that's what he wants.

The other thing I'll say is there's a big question about the power relationship, which is really important, which is to say he's sort of presuming you have this, you know, assistant, robot servant, ai servant that does everything you want faithfully.

You know, that does that is fundamentally your tool or your instrument.

You know, that would be great.

But I have my doubts as to whether that is the way it's going to be engineered, frankly speaking about, I think right now we're at the early stages, and in fact, I generally does what we say.

But I think increasingly it'll be like, well, maybe we'll have this discussion about couches, but maybe I've gotten money from this couch maker and maybe it's going to sort of steer you towards the idea you need to buy a new couch.

You know, it's not long before, but isn't that what Facebook already does?

It does.

And well, I don't know about its AI product, but certainly Facebook the the meta.

We're talking about the product.

Yeah.

The Facebook product.

Absolutely.

I mean, that's the whole oh, it goes back to my opening point is, frankly, these things should be nonprofits having commercial motives where they have the goal of trying to hook you and then extract money from you.

I just think it's a set up for, for really like a repeat of what happened with the internet, but worse.

Do you want an AI assistant handling your calendar, booking your trips, making decisions for you?

The last thing making decisions for me?

No.

Do I want and do I already use AI to tell me if I missed any important emails over the last week?

Yes, I like that, but all of it depends on whether I'm in control of it or not.

And I think the future, it's sort of jumped over in Zuckerberg's Mark Zuckerberg's, story, where we're talking about personal tech and, a very loyal kind of a very loyal AI.

What if we flip things around and in a sense, you're working for the AI effectively, or you have a job suddenly where you're used to be asked to do ten things and you're asked to do, you know, 3000 things with an AI, suddenly it's turned all around and you're the one working for the AI and sort of you're an appendage to the AI instead of it being subject to your commands.

Talking to Tim Wu, his newest book is The Age of Extraction How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threatened Our Future Prosperity.

You can see his public lecture this afternoon.

It is the 2026 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo, happening at 430 this afternoon at Doty Recital Hall.

It is free and open to the public.

And I mentioned earlier this hour that so Tim gets invited to go work in the Biden administration.

And, you know, it had had there been an eight year term, maybe had more time to kind of bear fruit there.

But I was asking Tim before the show, like my sense, being the outsider was that you maybe Lina Khan, get invited to the Biden administration and you're the trust busters, but you're with a lot of Democrats who are not trust busters, who are not as interested in going after Big Tech.

And did you feel like when you were in the Biden administration that you were sort of held on a tight leash, or did you feel like you had room to work in that?

I honestly would say that the president gave us room to work, but I would say that we had, you know, not only the wealth and resistance of the companies we did Sue.

I feel like this is sort of lost, but we did, in fact, win it.

Mike.

We won a monopolization case against Google.

Two monopolization cases.

Again.

We sued.

Apple sued.

Amazon sued.

Ticketmaster sued Ticketmaster.

Did you win that one?

We won that one, actually.

What happened people?

What happened with Ticketmaster?

Well, actually that that that talks about this this brings us to this administration.

We sued Ticketmaster on the premise that Ticketmaster is an abuse of monopoly, which I think if you pulled the average, you know, if you fold America, you'd probably get 99% on that, the 1% being employees.

Employees of Ticketmaster, and, and scalpers and so, that case, the federal government filed, the states also filed, the Trump administration came to power, and they're like, yeah, we can settle this.

They just dropped out of the lawsuit.

So actually, the state in the middle of trial.

So the states took that one to the finish line.

So, you know, there is something of a rebirth of antitrust and trust busting.

It is an uphill battle.

The I guess, forces of concentrated economic power have a lot of lawyers.

A lot of judges are skeptical.

It's hard.

The judges are actually pretty challenging.

But the white House, it wasn't their only priority.

And frankly, the greatest barrier for us was Congress.

We could not get anything.

We wanted to strengthen the antitrust law.

We wanted to write, privacy law, you know, so we don't have a privacy law.

I wasted I don't know how much of my life trying to pass the privacy law to Congress.

Nothing.

And no one ever says we don't like this.

They just push, comes to shove, never pass the laws.

Okay?

The average person, I think hears about privacy.

Yeah.

And they they feel uneasy.

We talked about the fact that if you talk about a couch today, the next time you open Facebook, you're going to see an ad for a couch.

And people feel like they're being listened to all the time.

People feel very weird about it or frankly, they feel like their privacy is being infringed.

But what is a tangible way of changing the law?

If you had your way and Congress was on board, what would have changed?

Well, I think it well, for one thing, I worked on child children's privacy, of all things.

You would think maybe if you're under the age of 16, you shouldn't have your all your data being sucked up by like, you know, the platforms and then process and trying to, you know, target ads to teenagers and and like tweens.

I couldn't even get that passed.

I mean, there's a, you know, who opposed you?

Well, that's the whole thing.

It's this big, murky Mr.. No one's.

Oh, we really care about.

And then we so everybody tells you, yes, we're on board.

We care about this.

I think when it comes down to it.

And Big Tech's quiet about it too, because child privacy, they don't want them on the other side of.

But when the moment comes, when that comes, somehow nobody really moves the bill.

I guess you honestly have to blame leadership or you have to blame leadership, or the people who take donations from Big Tech and ultimately call in their opposition secretly to Chuck Schumer, who then kills it quietly.

So to be clear here, the Republicans are in power now.

But when you were in the Biden administration, the Democrats were in power.

Yes.

And you still had that problem, couldn't get anything, could not get bills to protect children's privacy through Congress, through a Democratic Congress.

That's where we are in this country.

Children's privacy, children's privacy.

Do not send targeted ads to my children.

Who's on the other side of that argument?

Verbally?

Nobody behind the scenes.

A lot of senators, I don't know, actually, because I'll secret and there's no no accountability in our party, as far as I can tell.

Well, one party, I'm sorry, one of your senators is Chuck Schumer and is true.

Did you have you talked to him about this?

I we made our dissatisfaction clear.

I guess I personally have not said how did you not let this pass?

And they you know, actually the house was also involved.

There's there's so many people who failed us on that, on that, in that setting, getting into it is just a very painful because actually, Nancy Pelosi ultimately wouldn't advance any of these bills because of California's interests.

It just got it's very disappointing, that's all I'll say.

Oh, talking to Tim Wu about his experience in the federal government trying to get different tech laws enacted.

So I want to talk about how you would break up big companies if you could.

So the mechanism and what that would also look like, because when you pull the public, the public is not a big, generally big fan of tech right now.

You would think politically there would be a moment for this.

I take your point that if we can't get children's privacy passed, we're probably not getting anything passed.

But part of your argument is that it doesn't even serve the public well.

The term that I can't say that I would euphemism say is in crap ification.

Well, you define that first.

Sure.

I'll give credit to my old friend Cory Doctorow.

Cory makes the point, and I agree with this.

And it's my book is all about extraction.

His is about and crap ification.

I'm going to avoid FCC fines.

Yes, please.

I by the way, I'm FCC.

I, I understand those laws pretty well.

So, it is a cycle by which once a company gains monopoly or market power, it has no need to improve itself and in fact has strong incentives to un improve itself to make itself worse, in order to harvest more money or attention or data out of you, you know, so like, think about, I don't know, Google in 20.

Google's gotten worse over the last 15 years.

A Google, let's say, in 2010, in many ways, just gave you what you wanted and almost no ads.

But bit by bit by bit, they, felt the extreme pressure, despite their early promises to add more and more ads, and now you can't really tell what's advertised, result and what's the real result?

I'm talking about the search engine.

Yeah.

So I mean, that's just a good example.

And it's all in the interest, to use my phrase of extraction, of trying to get as much as you can.

Far more far, far in excess of the value provided.

And.

Yeah.

And you were asking me how I could get into what we do about that, but I'll leave it there.

Okay, but but just kind of expanding on the idea, I don't know hardly anybody who thinks Facebook's a better product today than when they started using it.

Probably more than a decade or almost two decades ago.

Yeah.

Same with Twitter.

Although Twitter, of course, had an ownership change and a change of direction.

Yeah, but I think Twitter was already sort of trending in that area.

I wish we had found a way to block that merger, by the way, when I was in the white House.

No we didn't.

What was the conversation like about about Musk taking over Twitter?

Is there a way, you know, is that we felt strongly that, I felt strongly, I should say that he was going to, ruin, destroy value and probably, he was going to both destroy value.

And also, you know, it's a public it's almost like a broadcaster, not be a, trusted, public interested, figure, you know, like in broadcasting, frankly, we're on a broadcast right now.

You're held to certain duties about the public and trying to, you know, perform in the public interest seem very clear to me that Twitter was not going to be run in the public interest.

And so I, I was saying, you know, this is like broadcasting we need to have some kind of public interest standards for the main, you know, speech platforms who have so much control over it or else it's going to become a propaganda outfit, which is frankly, why we have broadcast standards, because we had the example of Nazi Germany and other, you know, terrible propaganda, Jap Japan, other problems in the 1930s is why we moved to requiring some kind of public interest out of our broadcasters, but there's no legal authority to do that.

And everything prophesied happened.

But, you know, the critics are saying, well, sure, when Jack Dorsey leaves and Elon Musk comes in, you don't like his politics.

Now it's a problem for the public.

You didn't feel this way before.

It's all about the politics of the person behind.

What do you say to that?

I don't think that's true.

I think that I would say with all broadcasters, I'd say this about, any public broadcasters is they should be held to a public interest standard because their product is not like a toaster or something.

It has the power, to influence minds, to, create the kind of society you live in.

And we've always felt that needs to be subject to a public interest standard.

So it's not about politics.

You know, if you had some, some radical left wing, takeover of Twitter, I don't think Dorsey was quite that.

I also think they should be held to a public interest standard.

I think we need to get real about this.

I don't think Jack Dorsey was the mirror on the other side of Musk.

I agree with you.

Yeah, but, I'm just trying to understand where the critics are going to come in and hear you say, well, you're in the Biden White House and you only had a problem.

Musk comes in or your critics will say, hey, the Biden White House only wanted to throttle speech when it was speech they didn't like about the pandemic, trying to control what YouTube was putting out.

Did the Biden administration overreach with some of those efforts on the pandemic?

No.

I'm glad you got into that.

You know that I think we've lost sight of what the public interest is in some ways, when we think that trying to prevent people from publishing clear, medically, unsound and deceptive ideas about cures for Covid, you know, for the Covid virus that we think that's a violation of, of, of, of the public interest.

You know, I know I think that if anything, it wasn't like people were out there.

I mean, now we have Trump saying, I don't like what you say, so I'm going to ban you from the white House or, you know, things like that.

Trump is one of the most anti-free speech, probably the most anti-free speech press.

We're in a totally different dimension.

We were saying it's dangerous to have people advertising or talking about these quack cures that are costing people, money and possibly their lives.

And I think that's totally a totally different kind of public interest standard than, you know, trying to censor your critics.

So let me try to push on that from where your critics would come in.

I think they would say a couple of things.

I think they would say, first of all, the antidote to speech that is harmful or speech that you don't like is is more speech that is corrective or disputes that.

And then in the marketplace of speech, you've got to allow for more speech, not less.

I think they would also say that you may point to something that's totally off the cliff.

Quackery and obviously medically untrue, but there's plenty of gray area stuff.

And do you want to be litigating it or being the arbiter of where the actual we can't publish line is?

I mean, not everything is off the cliff.

Quackery.

Sometimes there is some questionable stuff or some bad ideas that are, you know, a little less certain.

And does the government want to play call balls and strikes on every one of those videos on YouTube, etc.?

Well, yes.

I don't think the government must actively, be involved in arbitrating what is, you know, the right answers or the wrong answers.

At the same time, when stuff is obviously fraudulent quackery, it's irresponsible for government not to use its powers.

We have false advertising laws.

We have, product disclosure laws.

You cannot just go out there and sell a product, say this will cure cancer, and think that's a legal product.

I think people have forgotten that there was an IT whole movement to destroy patent medicine.

And in an age of quack medicine, and that's the reason we invented the FDA, the Federal Trade Commission, false advertising laws, because people are, easily desperate.

People are easily, I guess I would say defrauded by, false medical claims.

And so this is not something like we were trying to invent.

There's a long tradition of policing false medical claims and government at some point has to make the call and say, like, if you cannot substantiate that, you can cure cancer, you cannot advertise saying you cure cancer because or, or whatever else you're saying you do.

And that is sort of the baseline, of, of, of, of a society that is not fraudulent.

So I think that's forgotten.

I guess I'd put it that way.

Okay.

Now to put a bow on the in gratification conversation.

Yes.

Your point is, I think well understood up to a point.

And then I want more explanation when you say when a company gains market share and then becomes essentially a monopoly, yeah, it doesn't have to improve because it doesn't have competition.

Yeah.

So it's got that monopoly power.

But then you said it's also incentivized to put actually a worse product out there.

And this is where I would I would say, wait a second.

Doesn't putting a worst product out there, in intentionally or not, doesn't that open the door to some kind of reemergence of competition?

If people are truly turned off by the quality, why is there an incentive to overtime to do worse for the customer?

To increase your margins so doing worse usually means increasing the amount of advertising or increasing the amount of data you take from people or spending less on, I guess, say, policing spam or other problems.

So it's all in the interest increasing.

Your own profit.

So that is where the incentive comes from.

Does that, you know, open the door, possibly.

The very sort of definition of a monopoly is that they have created barriers to entry.

Would they have?

Sorry, that's a technical term, but they've created a moat or some protection such that they can get away with it.

That's the problem with monopoly.

And you're right, if you take it too far and, you know, it's sort of amazing.

I mean, so take Google as an example.

Yeah.

So Google hasn't search has not really been something that's advanced like an advanced product for like ten years now.

But Google held its market share.

How did it do it.

Well, it didn't necessarily had a better product.

So it started paying everybody in order to hold its position.

And that's what our antitrust case focused on.

I think the $28 billion they were paying people to make sure that Google was always first.

So after a while, you know, the incumbent or the company can hold on even though they make their product worse.

And that's if they make it too bad.

Eventually they'll they'll collapse.

But companies can last a long, long time.

The job of my view of trust busting antitrust is actually to expose a company to a challenger by taking away its major defenses.

Well, as you've written about, Google has also bought up competitors.

Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp.

Yeah.

As examples.

So you eliminate the competition in the marketplace.

Is it simply making a decision that mergers like that or acquisitions are are not allowed?

Once a company gets large enough, do you see a government mechanism to bust them up to tell us what that would actually look like if you had your way?

Well, one is what you just said.

It is important.

And the government failed to do this, in the early 20 tens, prevent a company from buying its most important challengers or competitors.

You know, if you can just buy off anyone, if you have enough money, then you defend yourself with your cash.

I think you know there's no one size fits all solution.

I think that Google, search was well defended enough that they should have forced them to sell.

Sell off the Chrome browser and the antitrust case.

We brought the judge.

When I go there.

So I think it's, I think that's important.

But I've also come to think over time, at some point, you have to accept that, say, a company like Amazon is, you know, you don't want to break it because it's it's an efficient product and it is useful.

The problem there is more like a utility problem.

I mean, imagine electric networks to take an example, electricity to your house.

Imagine they could charge anything they want.

You know, what would they charge?

You know, I don't know.

You won't pay $1,000 a month.

You pay 2000.

I mean, you'd pay it.

And we have totally given up on the idea of some things being utilities and there being some upper limit on what you should pay to them.

And I think that has a lot to do with the affordability crisis in our time.

Last question before the break and then after the break, we're going to welcome feedback.

I've got emails already for Tim Wu.

It's Connections at wxxi.org.

If you want to email the program, as always, you can join the chat.

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If you want to call the program, it's 84429528442958255.

If you're the one person who's listening who thinks Facebook's better today than ten years ago, call us and tell us why.

Maybe there's more than one.

I don't know.

But we're talking about Tim's book and related themes in The Age of Extraction, how tech platforms conquered the economy and threaten our future prosperity.

Bill gates, talking to Ezra Klein this week about I said that of course we regulate drugs.

Of course we regulate so many parts of our society.

But right now, what we are doing with AI is akin to saying, hey, drug makers, no more rules.

Ship what you want.

So what you want to tell customers what's in it?

Don't tell customers what's in it.

And you know, if you kill a lot of people, then maybe you face a lawsuit.

That's Bill gates is that's where we are.

And that is a joke to say nothing of the fact of, you know, there's this debate about doom.

I don't know if Tim Wu has a personal doom.

Do you have P doom?

Do you have a. No, I'm actually not, I'm not.

No, I you're an optimist that it's at least not going to kill us.

Yes.

That's just going to make our lives different.

I think sometimes we spend a little too much on the existential doom and a little less on the day to day doom.

Maybe I'll put it that way.

Okay.

Fair?

Yes.

Do you agree with Bill gates that it is a joke that we've got regulations and so many different industries, but AI is barreling forward and we're basically telling the companies, hey, if you think you're going to kill a lot of people, please stop to do that on your own.

It reminds me a lot of pharmaceuticals, late 19th century, honestly, where, you know, cocaine was widely distributed.

It was in obviously Coca Cola and other products and ones like this will be fine.

You know, it took a long time to undo the damage of that of that era.

Actually reminds me a little of social media, in the sense we thought always, you know, it's fine to put a kid on a highly addicted screen product.

Yes, I think we it's, you know, we have to know what the real harms are.

I'm a little skeptical of just saying freeze everything because we don't know.

But as harms come up, I mean, I'll just take a great example, from my mind, human impersonation.

Like, what good comes out of something pretending to be a human?

Yeah.

I think I should be forced to self-identify all the time and make it clearance and stamped and, you know, a watermark to be clear that something is I or not, I like.

That's the beginning.

This is an important, foundational period where we have to get things right.

But I agree, I don't have a lot of confidence in our approach right now.

Bill gates is right.

First time I even interacted that I knew with an AI agent was like 3 or 4 Thanksgivings ago.

And I'm talking to the airline that's canceled my flight online.

Yeah.

And I'm asking, am I talking to a person?

And it was going, I'm here to help you, Evan.

I'm not.

Are you a human being?

Hey, I've got any information I can share.

I'll help you.

And I'm going.

I'm not talking to a person.

I'm not even talking to a human being.

But it wouldn't say so.

So you're saying at the very least, we should be able to identify when we're interacting with AI?

That's right.

I mean, do you ever see the movie Blade Runner?

Yes.

Kind of.

They they even had that line, Blade Runner.

When Blade Runner has a more effective government than our.

I haven't been our times runner had, had had child privacy laws, too.

So let's take this only break.

We're going to come back with Tim Wu.

And if you want to see him this afternoon, you can head out to SUNY Geneseo for a 430 lecture.

It is free and open to the public happening at Doty Recital Hall.

They would love to see you there.

His newest book, and he's got a pile of books he's written on tech and, even the ones that are more than a decade old, you go, oh, yeah, this is still this still tracks.

It's The Age of Extraction is the newest one.

How tech platforms conquered the economy and threatened our future prosperity.

Some of your feedback for Tim on the other side of this break.

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And she did it over six months.

That story next door.

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This is Connections I'm Evan Dawson.

All right David writes to say around 2011, in the Washington Post, Robert O'Hara described how in the very early days of the internet, some participants argued for a set of protocols to keep malicious actors out.

They lost because it would have cost money to build in safeguards.

So in the short term, it saved money.

But in the long term, it's led to all of the billions we spent fighting malware, phishing, etc.

plus time wasted with techies getting our computers reset.

I would love to know what Tim thinks about this failure to consider long term costs and what lessons, if any, he has for us about the future security and utility of the internet and transactions.

Yeah, so I feel like in the 1990s there was an extraordinary optimism about human nature.

And there's parts of that I really admire and want to hold on to.

You know, we kind of assumed with all these revolutions going on Eastern Europe, that a place like Russia would become a stable, happy democracy.

We thought that if you let anyone do whatever they want on the internet and say anything that would lead to a flourishing, it would be like we were living in ancient Greece and having, you know, thoughtful conversations about everything.

And there's some of that.

But I think we've learned our lesson.

And, you know, the decisions he's talking about were based on this real, innate faith that human beings are intrinsically good.

And I think that's true for 99% of human beings.

But 1% can really ruin things for everybody else.

Okay.

And are you somebody who does think, though, that the internet can be reclaimed for what you thought?

And maybe in the 90s it could provide or is it unsolvable?

That's a hard question.

I guess in some ways, I'm an eternal optimist.

I'm actually inspired by the story of television, where people in the 50s thought television had permanently gone off the rails, and then the 60s, you know, you had the birth of of and radio, honestly, you had the birth of, of PBS and public interest stations and better CBS and like 60 minutes and a bunch of stuff.

So I kind of believe these things are eternally capable of reinventing themselves.

And in the end of the book, I talk about how some of the old markets, even like Union Square in New York or in London, the old markets have been reclaimed and their infrastructure, you know, even when they were thought derelict, can be reconverted to good at some level.

The internet is infrastructure and infrastructure can always be reclaimed.

Anna writes to ask if you support Australia's ban on social media for under the age of 16, the answer is yes.

I think that we're going to in the long run, think of this like cigarets and children where we usually when I was growing up, it was not unusual to have like a 12 year old that was watching Bad News Bear the other day.

And like the, you know, the young teenager are smoking.

We thought that was fine and normal and yeah, I mean, I have young kids myself and I think, you know, it's coming.

I think under people's brains are forming and social media is bad for people's brains.

And so if you're an adult, it's one thing.

But I think that's coming, without getting, you know, have to answer any personal question, but I think people would be just curious.

Do you talk to your kids about social media?

I mean, is there a a there are no tolerance.

Is there, be smart in how you use kind of approach.

You know, they're still pretty young.

They're 13 and ten and they don't have phones and don't have social media at all.

So it hasn't been a big conversation.

I think that they're a little bit have absorbed the sense not just from me, that like the real hardcore TikTok kind of stuff is kind of dangerous, you know, and not a great thing to, to mess with.

TikTok is.

So I mean, I watch TikTok because if you don't, you know, it is really addictive.

Oh yeah.

And immediately they want more and more.

And our problems with more with like group chats, but, yeah, well, I mean, I don't have the data in front of me.

I'm reasonably certain, although the team can fact check me on this, that there's polling that says when you ask people, especially younger people, if you're on TikTok, all the time, a lot of people say yes, and it's multiple hours a day, and a lot of those same people would say, if you could erase it ever from being invented, I would be good with that.

Yeah.

Which is an interesting idea that someone would spend three hours a day on TikTok, but say if you could make it to it was never invented, that would be good.

Yeah, I really think it's a lot like 19th century opium, where it became kind of everywhere but the optimistic side of me.

Eventually people said, you know, everyone lying in their beds all day.

I look, we still have problems with opioids.

I don't want to under exaggerate that.

But there was a while where people thought, you know, be fine for everyone to have opium.

And, I think that stuff, it's just obvious that it's addictive and really powerfully addictive.

And, you know, it's it can be enjoyable.

But, particularly for kids, the case is very weak.

Andrew says related to regulating AI or regulating anything in a global economy.

What was Tim's experience like working with regulators from other countries?

What does he think could be done to improve international cooperation and coordination?

That's a very interesting question.

We, I worked on the team that was basically trying to repair our relationships with Europe, especially in the digital side of things.

Obviously, the first Trump administration had done great damage to our relationships and, you know, I liked it.

They they we had disagreements.

But, it does seem like, you know, an international challenge.

We had less interaction with our Chinese colleagues, but I thought that was a really important and productive side.

I got to say that the second Trump administration, another shows not about politics, but the thing that I find the most okay, they've done a lot of things I don't understand.

But turning Europe into our enemies is one of those I really don't understand.

And the digital is part of it.

And I don't know if we can repair that damage.

It would take it's going to take a while.

I don't want to, you know, sort of armchair quarterback.

But what I watching the vice president go to Europe and sort of lecture on free speech and those kind of ideals and then come back and, and in the last two years we've seen more of an erosion of, again, this is not meant to be sort of Partizan.

We've been talking about where Tim and the guest and, and frankly, where the evidence shows the Biden administration and Democratic Congress have fallen short.

In some ways, yes.

But the last two years, in terms of a direct attack on erosion of speech that simply on the president's whims of what he doesn't like, looks to me unprecedented.

And we all have recency bias, but is it unprecedented to you, to you think?

Tim, I think I've studied the history of, of American speech control and, using the FCC.

You know, there's always been, you know, efforts by presidents to try to encourage certain kinds of coverage and discourage other kinds of coverage.

Frankly, that's what we did in the Biden administration.

I think every presidency has done that.

But to outright try to shut down outlets, attack individuals, keep people out of the white House?

No, I don't think we've had this at least since maybe the 1890s and the Sedition Act, which is, you know, going back a 1790.

Sorry.

And that goes back a long way, maybe World War One censorship, but not in the last hundred years.

All right, back to feedback.

Tom writes to say, can you ask him if he could construct a curriculum to improve media literacy so that children and all consumers might be educated properly by media literacy?

What would you do?

Well, I think schools are sort of moving in this direction.

And interestingly, it's by moving away from, it's moving away from screens honestly, and moving back towards more paper and more pencils and, and focusing on having a brain that works well because I think, you know, the backstop to media literacy is some kind of attention span.

And I think what schools need to do is, frankly, in the same way, we need PE classes to make sure your body is is strong.

People increasingly need just to work on their attention spans and being able to read entire books.

Then you can talk about media literacy.

I mean, I think that you need that first, if that's the foundation of my view.

I was a long, exasperated sigh for me.

We had a whole program on talking to, university professors across the country who have students showing up regularly saying, well, I didn't have to read a full book in high school.

Yeah, I mean, I think you hear that from students.

No.

Maybe they just don't admit it to me.

But, I think there is this is my optimistic side again.

I think there was a period once again, where we just let everything go.

And the kids who are kind of in their early 20s are, you know, we're people that social media people phones at age 10 or 9.

I think the generation that's coming up, there is more effort to try to say, like, we can't let this happening.

This is like the social media ban.

16 so at least the optimistic side is is maybe people have were realizing that we created a generation that doesn't really know how to read.

Greg is asking, whatever happened to the TikTok ban that was supposed to take effect?

It did.

This is, Congress passed that ban eventually.

It was a good example of a current lawlessness.

It was suspended by the president a few times.

Ultimately, ultimately, TikTok was sold as you, as, you know, to, a number of interests among them.

So, it was settled that way.

I guess that's just the the answer.

On the other hand, in certain ways, I supported the TikTok ban.

Not just because I think the addictive product, but also because I think it is kind of crazy to have another country control what is effectively one of your main broadcasters.

You know, we have limits.

I go back to the history of broadcast regulation.

It would have been weird during the Cold War to let the Soviet Union control CBS news or something.

You know, we would have said, that's not going to work.

But look, China, one way or another, had control.

And I just think that was an intolerable situation.

Can you describe five steps towards autocracy just for the guest?

So, so we can keep it in our mind as a way of a handy little primer on where we're going?

Oh, thanks for bringing that in.

The Real Road to Serfdom as the title of that.

Yeah.

In the book, I have a description of how, you know, democracy becomes, an autocracy or a dictatorship.

And it starts in my mind with, monopolization of key industries and the creation of enormous disparity between rich and poor, a stage where there's an enormous extraction by the monopolies, if the monopolies kind of behave themselves thinking about an enormous extraction, where you start to have growth of resentment in the sense of people feeling like, what did I do?

It's the system is unfair.

And then at that point, if the democracy can rebalance things, if it can address this pervasive sense, not even just among poor, but among middle classes in majority of the population, that things aren't right.

If the democracy can address that, rebalance it, it will survive.

If it cannot manage to readdress this imbalance, it gives it creates an extraordinary window for the strongman to arrive who says, you know, democracy has failed.

I will do this for you.

And I'm not talking about our current I'm talking about repeated currents through history.

Oh, yeah, I'm talking about Hugo Chavez.

I'm talking about, no, or but I'm talking about all these figures, and they say, I will do it for you, trust me.

And that is basically the road to dictatorship.

And we've seen it repeat around the world in our lifetime.

You've said that it rises more easily coming out of the ashes of a crisis or a major sort of catastrophe.

But the historical analogs are out there.

So where are we on that road in your mind right now?

Well, I do think we have, you know, when I first described that it was in the 20 tens where I feared that the failure, frankly, of, even the Obama administration themselves also part of to kind of address fundamentally the imbalances in the economy, was going to give power and in fact, did to, an ascendant would be strongman.

The United States has a lot of checks and balances trying to to that try to do this.

We're in this weird stage.

I think, where the, you know, I'm thinking about the 1930s figures like Mussolini, where the command capitalist system, is starting to fail.

The scary part about that history is when figures like Mussolini started to fail.

What they started doing is attacking other countries to kind of try to keep their power in a different way if their economic, leadership was failing.

I mean, the fact is that if you have one man making all the economic decisions in a country, it can go.

It can times can go well, but often goes really badly, especially the longer you go see Hugo Chavez, XI Mussolini and so often they start to turn to violence against their neighbors.

So, I mean, that's a dark warning, but that's what history suggests.

Unless we manage to somehow unseat it through democratic processes.

Let's wrap up a listen to one more clip here, because there's going to be a lot of conversation about AI going forward.

This is RFK Jr onstage at the Make America Healthy Again conference, talking about what Sam Altman told him about how doctors should be behaving now.

He said today it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking.

Yeah.

So however good you think you are as a doctor, however much experience you now have to consult AI.

That's what Sam Altman says.

If you read Tim Wu's book and then you hear that, you see it through a different lens and you see it through this idea of the concentrated power that has happened in AI.

So, 90s, what's the prescription on what you would want to to see either government or other mechanisms to deal with what it looks like a pretty quickly concentrating set of power in AI.

Yeah.

So for one thing, I think it's important to make sure the AI platforms don't basically team up with the the the AI platform.

Companies don't team up with the, current tech platforms and become kind of an unstoppable force.

I think that's very important.

I think we need to pass the most obvious legislation to control the most obvious abuses, like human impersonation, and watching frontier models to make sure they don't go rogue.

I mean, it's crazy that AI is are escaping from labs, and the fact that's happening is an obvious sign that this is, you know, part of this is like viral research.

And last of all, I think we just on the topic of I need to see what can be done about the labor side of it and the problems of replacing, I think we're not taking this problem seriously with the replacing of huge parts of the human workforce.

You know, do I have a one size fits all answer for that?

No, but I think that the fact we're not even trying to think of measures to make, I serve humanity as opposed to vice versa is very a huge mistake.

I want to thank our guests for giving us an hour of his time.

Tim was.

Resume is too long to give you everything, but you've heard him talk about his work in presidential administrations.

He, of course, is a law professor at Columbia.

He's the author of a number of books, including The Age of Extraction.

And he's giving a public lecture at SUNY Geneseo this afternoon.

430 at Doty Recital Hall down at SUNY Geneseo.

They would love to see you there.

It is free and open to the public.

Tim, an honor to have you.

Thank you for making this time for us today.

I hope to hear see some listeners there and thank you for the great interview.

We got more Connections coming up in just a moment.

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