What does Zuck want? 🤔
#134 | And how to remain indistractable?
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
Hello and welcome to The Wisdom Project, a noise-cancelling filter for your mind, this is Wisdom Letter #134.
Last week someone asked an interesting question on Twitter.
“What if technology was accountable to those affected by it, rather than those who profit from it.”
And a meaningful discussion ensued:
This is a fundamental question we should be asking of ourselves as a society.
It seems that most tech products these days don’t care for the well-being of the users it’s supposed to serve.
Every new feature in our daily use apps is built to make sure that we keep using them more.
They want to harvest our attention and sell it to the highest bidder.
There are literal bids being placed by advertisers to appear in our social media feeds and search results.
This twists the incentives of the creators of these technologies. And as I argued in the discussion, humans run on incentives, not intentions:
So they are bound to build more tech to hack our attention. Even if it means that we lose our abilities to focus on deeper tasks and live increasingly distracted lives.
Mark Zuckerberg is at the forefront of the technological innovation happening in the way we connect with each other as a society.
He is the CEO of Meta and its family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger.
And he’s going deep into the metaverse: A virtual reality universe where we are all just avatars interacting with each other. While our physical bodies are sitting at home wearing virtual reality headsets.
Zuck thinks the metaverse is the future of how our society interacts with each other. It’s the new way of human connection.
And if you listen to his recent podcast appearances, it seems he has the best of intentions.
In his own head, he thinks this is a good thing for the world.
Do listen to his appearance on the Lex Friedman podcast:
Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex is an amazing host, asks pointed questions.
But Zuck is also a great guest, he never flinches and makes a strong case for the kind of world he’s building.
You almost feel like his intentions are pure. But as I said at the top of this post - The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It’s not that there are evil people in the world, instead, it’s just that the good people are racing in the wrong direction.
🤷
We don’t know what’s the future.
We don’t know where the world is going, but we do know how we can take care of our own minds.
How to stay indistractable.
Nir Eyal explains the best tactics to stay indistractable in a busy world on this podcast.
It’s with Shane Parrish of The Knowledge Project:
How To GET MORE DONE and AVOID DISTRACTIONS | Nir Eyal
Related:
We’ve written previously about Zuck and Facebook:
Zuck’s going meta | Wisdom Letter #113:
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This Week that year:
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Learning For Life | Wisdom Letter #30
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