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.

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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:

Josh @joshpitzalis

Imagine if technology was accountable to those affected by it rather than to those who profit from it.

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:

Ayush 🙏 @ayushtweetshere

@joshpitzalis It would. But is it in the incentives of the people who weild technology? Humans run on incentives, not on good intentions. Sad truth.

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.

🤷

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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

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Related:

We’ve written previously about Zuck and Facebook:

Zuck’s going meta | Wisdom Letter #113:

Zuck's going meta👨‍💻

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Tweets to make you think 🤔

Ayush 🙏 @ayushtweetshere

If you're a corporate employee you should think deeply about this letter. On the face of it, this is basic economics. "Wayne's wisdom" is just the demand-supply curve. But the real question is - Are you a commodity? Do you want to be just a dot on someone's graph?

Daniel Vassallo @dvassallo

When you're an employee, you're often treated like cattle. Milked as much as possible, and slaughtered when not useful anymore. https://t.co/muTK8movlq https://t.co/l18InttaJw

Ayush 🙏 @ayushtweetshere

If you're building something cool, make sure you document your journey. 1. Either in a private diary. 2. Or in a public on a blog/Twitter. The 1st one will help your future self make sense of your success/failure. The 2nd one will also help folks around you.

Aditi • Mental Models @Hi_Aadi

People who brag about their strong desire to learn are often not learning anything at all. They are not looking for learning, they are looking for proof that shows them as a learner. - An expensive degree/course - Stack of books - Good read challenges Etc

Aditi • Mental Models @Hi_Aadi

We need to make about 35000 decisions in a day That is a lot of work for the brain. So much work done by a high-energy-consuming organ like the brain would starve us to death So the brain hacks itself. It resorts to defaults Design better defaults for a better life 🧵

This Week that year:

• Some Obvious Risks You Ignore | Wisdom Letter #82

• Learning For Life | Wisdom Letter #30

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