James P. Steyer - Which Side of History?

Copyright 2020 by Common Sense Media.

The Greatest Propaganda Machine in History 2020 Sacha Baron Cohen. Be Paranoid by Kara Swisher. From The New York Times. 2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. The Known Unknown by Shoshana Zuboff. From The New York Times. 2020 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. When Data Drives Decisions 2020 Michael R. Bloomberg. Tech, Heal Thyself 2020 Ellen Pao. We Need a New Capitalism, Based on Trust excerpted from Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change by Marc Benioff, copyright 2019 by Salesforce.com, Inc. Used by permission of Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg by Aaron Sorkin. From The New York Times. 2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. Technology and Social Connection by Vivek Murthy. Adapted from Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World (New York: Harper Wave, 2020). What, Me Worry? The Rise of Stealth Parenting 2020 Julie Lythcott-Haims. Is This the Culture That We Want? 2020 Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Bolstering Democracys Immune System 2020 Craig Newmark. Repairing a Fractured America 2020 Lawrence Lessig. The Era of Fake Video Begins by Franklin Foer. Adapted from Realitys End, an article originally published in the May 2018 issue of the Atlantic. Republished with permission from the Atlantic. The Informality Machine by Yuval Levin. Adapted from Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2020). Were All Connected but No Ones in Charge by Thomas Friedman. From The New York Times. 2017, 2018, and 2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. Mad Men and Math Men by Ken Auletta. Partially adapted from Ken Auletta, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) (New York: Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018). The Three Sacredsand Their Disruptions 2020 Howard Gardner. The New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin. Adapted from Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). The Newest Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. From The New York Times. 2018 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.Transforming the Attention Economy 2020 Tristan Harris. How Technology Can Humanize Education 2020 Sal Khan. Making Mischief 2020 Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley. Has Coronavirus Made the Internet Better? by Jenna Wortham. From The New York Times, also published as The Good Place. 2020 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. Making Internet Platforms Accountable 2020 Roger McNamee. Restructuring the Tech Economy 2020 Jaron Lanier.

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For my lovely wife, Liz. A great person
and a great mom, who is definitely
on the right side of history.

Ja mes P. Ste yer

James P. Steyer is founder and chief executive officer of Common Sense Mediathe nations leading nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving media and technology choices for kids and familiesand longtime award-winning professor at Stanford University.

We are living in a truly remarkable time. Our lives and entire society have been transformed by a technology revolution and its 24/7 influence on so many aspects of our reality. The COVID19 pandemic and the nationwide movement for racial justice have made it even clearer how essential these tools are for our daily lives. When I wrote my last book, Talking Back to Facebook, in 2012, my goals were simple enough: first, to highlight the extraordinary impact that the internet and technology companies were having on the lives of kids, families, and the fabric of our social and emotional relationships. And second, to give parents a few tips on how to raise kids in this new era of smartphones and social media. Little did I know that a mere eight years later, most thoughtful people would indeed be talking back to Facebookand that the grip of smartphones and social media would impact and at times threaten not only our children and family relationships but virtually everything we hold dear.

Silicon Valley has clearly followed through on its promise to change the world on a vast scalenot necessarily for the better. Bot by bot and tweet by tweet, the ghastly circus of the 2016 US election hacking, as well as the spiraling descent of our public discourse, have put the very pillars of our democracy at risk. Smartphones and social media have chummed a surveillance and attention economya virtual arms race for your and my attentiondesigned to invade our privacy, monetize our secrets, and steal every waking moment of our lives. Not by accident, we are lonelier, sadder, more anxious, and more divided as a result. Perhaps most disturbing, the most vulnerable laboratory animals for techs sweeping, unregulated, and truly pioneering social experiment have been an entire generation of innocent, unwitting kids, including my own four children. More than any other segment of society, our kids have been in the crosshairs of the technology revolution. They are the ones who will most profoundly experience its benefits, disruptions, and consequences for our future.

Facebook, according to its founders, was supposed to chronicle our lives and bring us together in unprecedented ways of frictionless sharing. Now it more often serves to chronicle and accelerate our collective slide toward the abyss. No company has ever known so much or learned so little in such a short time. Facebook began the last decade by entering into a major consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission for widespread privacy violations. Sadly, it ended the decade with the FTC imposing a record $5 billion finewidely criticized as too smallfor breaching that same agreement. Facebook can name all your friends, track your location, and predict your next purchase, but it also served as the main platform for Russian interference in our 2016 election and fatuously claimed not to realize that was happening.

Inevitably, the company whose mantra explicitly set out to move fast and break things finally broke its own industrys darkest secrets wide open. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has forced a reckoning with the devils bargains that our society has chosen to ignore for much too long.