We're surfacing this theme over and over again. If you think about the history of science and engineering in the 20th century, the whole idea was that systems would be created to cure and to provide fail-safe for any problems. In medicine, for example, the idea was vaccines that could counter viruses. In engineering, it was backup systems, fail-safe systems, layers of systems that could counter crises when they occurred—safety.
It's extraordinary that the Internet has been loosed upon the world to launch viruses without vaccines and to create channels for the kinds of things you are describing—the robots and the disinformation—without any kind of fail-safe system. As we've been discussing, this goes back to a fundamental problem, which is that there is no such thing as content moderation. There are only behavioural surplus supply chains and the idea of protecting these flows of behavioural data. Everything the platforms do is down a very narrow line. The only action that emerges is if they're in danger of losing user engagement, abusing surplus flows, or on the other hand, if they're in danger of attracting legal scrutiny.
Other than that, there is no action that they are programmed to take, because it is fundamentally an existential threat to do anything that limits behavioural surplus flows, the data flows.
That's where we have the opportunity, and you have the opportunity, to create those interventions when there are.... I don't think it can be just a knee-jerk reaction to the problems that the president confronted at a certain moment. We have to think more systemically, and go back to the root causes. Otherwise, we are in danger of falling into the problems that Mr. Zimmermann was referring to, which are that our governments are seen as self-serving.
We have to devise these fundamental mechanisms that we insist upon: that there can be no virus without vaccine, and that there have to be routine ways for lies to be stopped. That is an existential threat to surveillance capitalism. Therefore, we go back to the foundations here of addressing the economic logic. That's going to cover the sexual assaults in the social network, as well as the political assaults. All of these are captured by the same economic contradiction.