Transcription
I'm going to perform this entire video as one uncut take, with no edits. If I make a mistake or forget my lines, we are just going to keep it in. It's an attempt to create, uh, kind of an anti-content, going against the best practices of social media content. I guess that used to be called Art, right? You see, I've been spending a lot of time on TikTok, and I have some concerns about how it's affecting democracy. Here's three myths: uh, number one, the problem is fake news; number two, TikTok teens will save the world; and number three, social media holds politicians accountable. I'm going to bust these myths.
In ye old days, if you wanted information about politics, there was one or maybe a few centralized Outlets. But nowadays, anybody can pick up a smartphone and start contributing to the information environment. The result is a massive increase in the amount and diversity of information available. And on the one hand, that might be a good thing. Societies need a lot of information to function—information like, how many swords do we have? How many barbarians are at the gate? How quickly can we make a lot more swords? That information is scattered through Society, in the heads of lots of different people. Democracy is one method of gathering and processing it. And in theory, liberal democracies with robust human rights protections should be better at solving problems than authoritarian regimes, because if people can feed back information to the government in the form of Elections and protests and Free Speech in the media and so on, then Vital Information can make its way up the chain, and the government can act on it—in theory. Whereas dictators just end up surrounded by people who tell them the information they want to hear, which makes them pretty bad at actually running countries.
Uh, so a big increase in the amount and diversity of information available, thanks to social media, could be a really good thing for democracy and maybe even good for us as individuals, because, you know, it exposes us to all kinds of different points of view and so on. But um, on the other hand, uh, a massive increase in the amount of information that citizens have to process is uh a little bit overwhelming—completely overwhelming, actually. I'm I'm exhausted. I'm I'm I'm I'm depressed. I'm anxious. I'm wired all the time, and I I I can't sleep. I'm filled with a with a crushing sense of dread. Must be an election year. I need to touch grass somehow. This just isn't helping.
There are two possible responses to information overload. The first is learned helplessness. Well, you can't possibly process all this information, so you just stop trying. Maybe you become apathetic. Oh God, we're all the same anyway, right? So much contradictory information out there, who even knows what's going on anymore? Who even knows what's real? In the worst cases, people become anxious, depressed, maybe more easily manipulated. Or maybe you start taking shortcuts with the political information you do consume. Instead of actually listening to what politicians are saying, you just pay attention to the Vibes. Politics becomes something a bit more like um, sports or fandom. Like, have you seen that one TikTok of Tim Walls in a Runza? Man, I love that guy. Couldn't name a single one of his policies. I don't actually even know what a Runza is, but anyway, he seems like a real sweetheart.
The other response to information overload is selective exposure. That's where you limit yourself to only consum—assuming information that already fits your narrow worldview. We could call that filter bubbles, or uh, maybe Echo Chambers. In the 1990s, they called it cyber balkanization, which I think sounds a lot cooler personally. We should have stuck with that. This response is really good for platforms themselves. If everybody's sorted into their nice little algorithmic niche, that makes it easier to hit us with targeted ads, and we love it. Posting nice simp—simple content that aligns with your Niche gets you that sweet sweet clout in the form of likes and shares. I mean, what do you get by posting challenging, nuanced content? I guess I wouldn't know. Selective exposure might contribute to political polarization and maybe an increase in authoritarian thinking, as people come to believe that discussion is impossible because everyone's living in wildly different versions of reality. Although I should stress that, from the research I've read, that remains an unproved Theory. It's a thing some people worry might be happening.
Unfortunately, both of these effects can be gamed by Bad actors. Social media can be used to spread propaganda at speed and scale, especially now, thanks to AI. Part of the problem is fake news, but only part. Another tactic might be uh, deliberately flooding the information space with a lot of contradictory information to push people into learned helplessness and selective exposure. For example, in 2017, a bunch of documents leaked from a government office in China showing that the Chinese government regularly employs people to post on Chinese social media. By analyzing the wording of the posts, researchers were able to estimate that the government writes approximately 448 million posts every year, which wow. I mean, if you work for the Chinese government, leave a comment. Most of the posts were positive, and they almost never lied about anything. Uh, they usually spiked uh, on national holidays or or just after big events like riots and terrorist attacks—anytime people might feel the need to get in the streets and protest. Government posters would write about positive things that the government was doing or or maybe just factual things like, there is an upcoming conference. The researchers hypothesized that the goal was to distract people and dilute negative sentiment, still playing on learned helplessness and selective exposure, but just through positivity. And that might seem very scary, like, oh my God, if you thought fake news was bad, it's only the tip of the iceberg. But there might actually be some cause for optimism here. Fake news is one possible part of illicit influence campaigns. That's why Bad actors use social media to try and modify people's behavior. Illicit influence campaigns need assets—things like websites, fake social media profiles, tame influencers. They also need things like money and time and coordination, and those things are easier to go after than just lies. People are always going to post [ __ ] on the internet, and there's not really a whole lot that we can do about that, but we can Target illicit influence campaigns at the source.
Here's an example from very recent news. Conservative influences Tim P, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, and Benny Johnson have all worked for the American production company Tenant Media. In a recent US Federal indictment, Tenet's Founders are accused of taking almost $10 million from the Russian government to create content that polarizes the American public and potentially subverts their election, deliberately pushing people into learned helplessness and selective exposure, allegedly. The influencers themselves didn't even know their paychecks were coming from Putin. So here we have a real-life example of an illicit influence campaign, and fake news isn't the heart of the problem. Tim pool and the rest post a lot of crap, but fact-checking them isn't going to make them stop, because they're paid not to care. And Their audience probably aren't going to stop watching and sharing that kind of content either, because they've selective exposured themselves into an online community that fulfills some psychological need for them, whether the information they're sharing is true or not. Like, it's social media—emphasis on the social—so probably better to tackle the campaign at its source, which is what the US government is trying to do. Fake news is not the heart of the problem here. And hey, that was our first myth, so we can go and cross it off the board. Man, it feels really good to bust myths. And now on to our second: TikTok teens will save the world.
Now, social media can affect some changes in society. #MeToo started as a hashtag, and as a professional actor, I can tell you it has had some effects on the industry. It's a lot more common now to have an intimacy coordinator on set when shooting a sex scene, for instance, and that's that's good, you know, that's not nothing. Black Lives Matter started as a hashtag, and now it's an international movement in control of several million dollars worth of donations. It is possible to grow a movement online, uh, and also to fundraise from a wider group of people than you could in ye old days. Unfortunately, that also means that movements uh can quickly grow beyond their capacity to organize, which leads them to fizzle out or splinter. The more a movement is social media based, the less it has to answer tough questions about uh leadership and responsibility and delegation—things that bind a movement together for the long run. An example might be uh Occupy Wall Street, which uh got a lot of people moving and in the streets but didn't really stick The Landing. It's easier than ever to join a social movement, but uh it's also easier than ever to drop out of one. And that in turn also means that it's uh easier for governments to just ignore large protest movements if they have a large social media component to them. I mean, yeah, you might get a quarter of a million people in the streets every Saturday, but uh as long as most of them are taking pictures of their funny signs and posting them online, they're not organizing direct action, and uh if they are, you can always just arrest them. So uh, did we bust? I feel like we busted. Why don't we call this one a a partial bust?
And that leaves us with our third myth: social media holds politicians accountable. Now, in the early 2010s, it was fashionable for people to say that Twitter might bring down authoritarian regimes, uh especially after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted in the so-called Arab Spring. It was a series of popular revolts that happened in many countries that had a large social media component to it. Although these days, the idea that Twitter might be good for democracy is uh almost a little quaint. The uh new Egyptian leader was quickly replaced by military dictatorship. China uses social media to control its population, as we saw, and Western elections are definitely vulnerable to illicit influence campaigns. You can use social media to do public humiliation—oh, absolutely no problemo. It's really really good at that. You can bully politicians all day long. You can humiliate a billionaire so badly he tanks his own businesses and gets clowned on by his own daughter, but that's not necessarily the same thing as accountability. In his book *The Unaccountability Machine*, journalist Dan Davies says that accountability isn't actually a person-to-person thing at all. It's a function of the way organizations process information. As organizations become more complex, they develop ways of limiting the amount of information that flows through them, just to stop them from becoming overwhelmed by it, and that can result in outputs that no individual actually decided on, because the relevant information never crossed anybody's desk, and so there might genuinely be nobody to hold accountable. An example could be uh Boeing. Nobody at Boeing decided to make [ __ ] planes. They wanted to cut costs, so they outsourced key jobs, and they ignored whistleblowers—I.E., they dismantled the systems that feedback information to the top. The result is a system that makes planes, even though no individual actually decided to do that. Uh, so if Davies is right, then social media might be very limited in its capacity to deliver true accountability. It increases the amount of information out there, but that's not the same as saying that organizations actually have the structures in place to process it, which is what real accountability requires. Like uh, do remember this? Yeah, reluctantly, I have to bust this myth. So uh, the impact of social media on Democracy is uh sort of a mixed bag. It's a double-edged sword. The things that make it good are also kind of the things that make it bad, uh, and that prompts the obvious question: now what?
Well, I have an exciting solution for you. It's called middleware. It's not actually a solution. I'm I'm I'm setting something up here. I'm going to pull the rug out from under you in just a moment. Middleware is a layer of software that would go in the middle of social media platforms and their users to filter content. Right now, a lot of social media platforms do their content filtering in-house, but gives them a lot of power over what kind of information users see. Middleware would Outsource that content filtering to third-party companies and allow users to choose between them, the same way that you choose a browser. So, for example, let's say you were a big-time conservative and you were really worried about Big Tech censoring conservative viewpoints online, you could choose a middleware company that only showed you content and ads that aligned with your values. It would be free, and the companies would make money with a share of the ad Revenue that currently goes to platforms. There are some potential privacy issues with middleware, uh, for example, if I post nudes and your middleware company filters nudity, do they get to see my titties, even though I didn't sign up to them and I didn't consent to them seeing that data—the data that is my titties? Like, presumably they have to see it in order to filter it, but do you see how that would be a problem? It also doesn't really solve The Selective exposure thing; in fact, it leans into it. But in theory, middleware would take power away from Big Tech and stop extremist content going mainstream by hitting the front page. You know, could be a pretty good thing. It also wouldn't restrict anybody's free speech to post whatever they wanted. It's all right here in this lovely paper, which was written by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist who famously said in the '90s that history was over because the Soviet Union collapsed. I guess history is not over after all. Going back at 3:00 a.m. for more history. But why is he writing about social media, and who's he working for? The Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Let me look these guys up. Okay, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center is a collaboration between Stanford Law School—makes sense—and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Who are they? The Freeman Spogli Institute has no political ideology, okay, but is a research and teaching Hub. Okay, so they're like a think tank, kind of. Founded following a $50 million donation from Freeman Spogli & Company, a private Equity Firm specializing in Middle Market companies. Okay, yeah. H, I wonder why those guys would be keen to fund a research paper saying that a bunch more Middle Market companies would be a good idea. Oh gosh, fellas, there's this whole new market of middleware companies out there, created and ring-fenced by government legislation, but wouldn't you know it, somebody's got to finance it. If only a handsome private Equity Firm could swoop in and save the day. Illicit influence campaigns—not just a social media thing, it turns out. Is this just an influence campaign? What makes it illicit? I mean, I guess technically American companies are allowed to try and influence the American government, whereas Russians aren't. Is it only illicit when foreign countries do it? And who's Freeman Spogli? Sounds like an elderly Italian pasta maker. Oh, it's actually two guys: Bradford Freeman and Ronald Spogli, the conservative businessman. That's almost a bit disappointing, isn't it? But Ronald Spogli was made ambassador to Italy by his former college roommate, President George W. Bush. Okay, ah, okay. Too much information. Got to focus. Um, I got to touch grass.
Okay, now, to be fair to the Frankenstein—the Gole Institute—to to the to the Fran Guggenheim—to Frid—to Francis Fukuyama and all of his all of his buddies, I'm sure that they are fine people, and we can consider their ideas on the merits. In order to really understand the impact of TikTok or any social media platform on Democracy, we need to think about how it fits in to the economy. Social media is an outgrowth of something called surveillance capitalism. That's the practice of spying on people and recording our Behavior—things like our browser history, purchase histories, the contents of our emails, our location, our face expressions and voice and so on—turning that behavior into data and using that data to predict what you will do next. This started with targeted ads in the early 2000s. Google realized that all that data they were gathering by surveilling their users could could be used to predict that you will buy a product if you are advertised to in the right way, thus making their predictions extremely valuable. How valuable, you ask? Well, obviously depends on how accurate they can be. And so surveillance capitalism's business model incentivizes spying on you and Gathering as much of your data as possible. And since then, this Dynamic has leaked from online into the real world too—The Internet of Things. One example might be car insurance. In theory, a car insurance company could put a tracking device in a car or maybe an app on your smartphone that monitors your driving habits. They could adjust your premiums in real time. They could even nudge you into adopting different kinds of driving behaviors—like, if you habitually drive very very very very fast, then they might send you an alert on your smartphone saying, oh hey, if you keep driving fast, your premiums are going to go up, and so you'd slow down. After all, the shest way of predicting somebody's behavior, and therefore the most profitable way of predicting somebody's behavior, is to modify it. In this example, drivers would be kept under constant surveillance and their behavior modified so that insurance companies can make more money. And the exact same principles can be applied to politics, because if a company can do that, a politician can do it too. That's what the Cambridge Analytica Scandal was. And if a politician can do it, a whole government can do it. That's what the Chinese Communist Party are doing with social credit scores. The exact same Technologies used to send me Instagram ads about productivity software and nudge me into buying [ __ ] I don't actually want can be used used to subjugate an entire population. And that puts us in a very tight spot. In her book *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*, sociologist Shoshana Zuboff says there's a strong anti-democratic streak to this technology. After all, nobody voted for constant surveillance and behavior modification. The companies that do it do it unilaterally, sometimes illegally, to the benefit of a tiny number of people. This whole thing about ticking agree to a massive terms of service that we don't actually read makes some makes a mockery of the notion of informed consent. And actually, the whole business of surveilling people, predicting what they're going to do, and modifying their behavior erodes the model of society where free, equal people come together, decide what to do, and trust each other, seeking to replace that model with a new kind of society where people are constantly surveilled and prodded by computers to act like computers—predictable, coordinated, and working for someone else. There's a straight line from this kind of technology to cryptocurrency, which seeks to replace central banks and governments with the blockchain. Oh, you won't need to trust anybody anymore. We're not going to need a social contract anymore. Code is law. There's also a straight line to AI, which is largely built on taking people's data without their knowledge or consent. Zuboff says we need legislation that gets rid of all of this pronto, and that's a pretty big ask, cuz some of the biggest companies in the world—Google, Facebook, Microsoft—are up to their necks in it, not to mention a lot of security agencies post-9/11 and again, China. But if it's that or democracy, democracy. One thing is for sure: middleware ain't going to cut it, Francis. History is happening again, Francis. And yes, I'm aware of the uh the irony, maybe even the hypocrisy of complaining about this sort of thing on YouTube, a platform that is literally owned by Google. But I don't think it's unethical how to produce content or even to watch it. My objection is uh with the econom—the conditions under which that production and consumption occur—namely, the part where everyone involved, you and me, is being spied on. We could still have digital connection and social media and even YouTube without all this surveillance stuff. I mean, we did until like, what, 2005? This isn't even me saying, ooh, capitalism bad. We could do capitalism without this stuff. Again, we did. Surveillance capitalism arguably represents a break with free market ideology into something much more centrally controlled, and we landed here pretty much by accident. None of this was inevitable or the future or built into the technology. All of that is just marketing for tech companies. So it's kind of annoying that the big discussions we keep defaulting to when it comes to social media are free speech and fake news, cuz we have much bigger fish to fry. TikTok, Facebook, smartphones, Smart Homes, digital assistance, ebooks, face recognition, voice recognition, The Internet of Things, the Chinese Communist Party, predictive policing, most of the security state post-9/11, and Pokemon Go are all part of the same pattern now, wherein whole sections of the economy and government are an illicit influence Campaign, which arguably runs counter to the deepest principles of democracy itself. [Music]
Although maybe that's not such a bad thing. At the top of the video, I describe democracy as a method for Gathering and processing information, and if that's all it is, why wouldn't we replace that with computers? If we could know what everybody wants once before they even know it themselves—even influence what they want—gather all the information that we need to solve the problems, then I mean, why would we bother asking them? You got to admit China is doing pretty good right now. Maybe we could use a little bit of what they've got going on. As research for this video, I read a lot of Dark Enlightenment thinkers, people like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton, who want to replace democracy with a um, you know, words like monarchy and aristocracy and corporate dictatorship sound so old-fashioned, so we'll have to come up with something new. I don't know, we'll do some marketing, we'll we'll Workshop that, but you know, some kind of system where the best people are in charge—you're the most technically able people—instead of the mob, because democracy is so frustrating. I mean, did you know that I've lost every election I've ever voted in? And I have a first-class Philosophy degree from one of the best universities in the world—world. I am more widely read than 99% of the population. I have lived My Life as a man and as a woman—a breadth of experience that few members of the species can even imagine—and I live in England. Have you seen the people who run this place? Do you think I don't resent having to follow their rules every single day of my life? Of course I [ __ ] do. I could do a better job with my eyes closed. I could be in charge. I should be in charge. And if people wouldn't listen to me, then I could use this kind of technology, and finally I could make them listen.
That kind of thinking is becoming more and more popular, especially in the tech world—the world of surveillance capitalism. People like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, they're fishing in that pond. Surveillance capitalism's ability to subjugate people makes it attractive to authoritarians of all Stripes, including religious authoritarians, people like J.D. Vance, and white supremacists—racial authoritarians. And I get the frustration with democracy, believe me. I I really I really do get it. Part of what keeps me out of that dark place is knowing that whilst I have a lot of information in my head and I've achieved some things in my life, a lot of that was down to luck or privilege. You know, if I'd been hit by a car at 14 and I'd had to spend 2 years learning to to walk again, then uh probably wouldn't have had time to study and get good grades and get into a good University. And uh I could be in an accident tomorrow. I could, you know, damage my brain and lose it all. So having more information or resources or whatever doesn't doesn't mean that I have the right to tell anyone else what to do. It gives me the responsibility to use those gifts to help other people.
So what if democracy isn't just a way of gathering information to solve problems? What if it's meant to be a process where free, equal individuals come together and agree to be bound, even though we aren't forced? Maybe it's not a system for choosing the best leader or guaranteeing the best outcome, as maddening as that is sometimes, but maybe it's meant to be a system that has maximum respect for everyone's equal Humanity. And in a world where people's humanity is all too often ignored or sidelined for war and profit, I think that we could do with more democracy, not less.
This is the part of the video where normally I would do an ad read for Nebula, the streaming service that sponsors my content, but uh given the subject matter, it would feel a little bit weird to just play that straight. So what if instead we had a really Frank and honest discussion about how Nebula fits into all of this, uh and and you can make up your own mind. Um, let's use it as a case study, and uh well, I guess if I'm doing anti-content, I might as well do an anti-ad, right? So um, first of all, I should explain what Nebula is, in case any of you haven't heard of it. Um, it's a premium streaming service that I and a bunch of other creators co-own. There's about 200 creators on there at the moment, and on Nebula we put uh ad-free videos, bonus videos, uh like um Early Access videos, um and also fully produced Nebula Originals, uh like my play *The Prince*. I wrote a a fiction play that we staged in London a couple years ago. We filmed it, and the film was on Nebula. Um, also uh my movie *Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend*, which I I just wrote and acted in, that's just come out on Nebula. 2. Nebula doesn't run ads; uh instead they are funded by subscriptions, like any other streaming service. Uh, now I need to make sure I use absolutely precise wording here, so um here we go. When people sign up to Nebula using my link specifically, I get a cut of that subscription, and they get a discount. Now I say that to explain how the system works and also to highlight to you that I have a direct Financial incentive to believe and to say that Nebula is good, so feel absolutely free to bear that in mind throughout the following. In general, Nebula try to minimize what data they do gather. If you're running a streaming service, you need people's payment information, uh and also an email address—like it wouldn't work otherwise. In order to pay the right taxes, they also need to know what jurisdiction you're in. Uh, they also need to know which link users click to sign up, so they know which creators to pay and how much, so they can tell whether you sign up using my link or Lindsay Ellis's or LegalEagle's and so on. Uh, the software that actually encodes and plays the video needs to know things like what kind of device you're on and what browser you're using, so that it can send the videos to you. Nebula tries to keep user data in-house as much as possible, so the video playing software itself was actually written in-house. Um, it may also gather data on how long you're watching and general location information, like what country you're in. Uh, so for example, if a million people in Brazil suddenly start watching Big Joel videos for hours and hours and hours, then they'd be able to see that. Data is used for internal business stuff, uh like sharing Revenue with creators based on watch time. You can turn that data Gathering off in your privacy settings if you want to, uh and they also don't use any of that data to train AI, which I really like. Uh, in general, the AI policy is is pretty good, and it should be, because as one of the co-owners of Nebula, I actually had a hand in shaping that policy, so that's pretty cool too. Uh, in order to operate the business, some of the backend software comes from third-party companies, and Nebula shares some data with them. For example, the analytics stuff about watch time and your payments is processed by a third-party company. Uh, another example: if someone experiences an error on the platform, Nebula may use data like what device you're watching on, what version of the app it's running, and your IP address, and they kind of have to do that in order to make it work. Uh, so for example, if everyone in France on iPhone uh suddenly gets a software update and they can't use Nebula anymore, then that's kind of important information from the point of view of fixing it. Uh, the software they use for logging and tracking errors is third-party; currently they use a company called Sentry, which again allows them to limit how much user data they share. Yeah, I think I got that right. Yeah, all very precisely worded. Um, when I chatted...
About all this with Nick, Nebula's Chief Product Officer, he answered all my questions. Uh, and also he highlighted to me that Nebula's business model isn't based in that surveillance and prediction world. Uh, instead, it only really works when creators get our audiences to sign up. Um, so audience trust is the most important thing, um, not audience data.
Uh, so whereas say other social media platforms, uh, might monitor what what other apps you have installed on your device in order to make sure like maximize the amount of time that you spend on their app and send you as many targeted ads as possible, uh, Nebula doesn't need to gather that kind of data, uh, and so they don't. So in general, uh, I think there's a pretty good case for saying that Nebula do a good job here. Um, not zero data collection because they couldn't make it work with zero data, um, but uh, they are transparent about what they do with it, um, and that's pretty cool of them. They also, I mean, they could have just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Ah, selling people's data, that's uh, that's just the industry standard now, you know, that's how the economy works," but they didn't. So that's pretty sweet of them.
I'm double-checking about everything here. The legal department were just like, "Oh, okay, got to make sure we're very, very transparent with people." Yeah, cool, awesome. As mentioned, I have a financial incentive here, so feel absolutely free to go and double-check all of the policies and statements yourself. Thank you very much for watching my weird anti-content. I would like to say a massive thank you to the Philosophy Tube crew who went along with my weird idea of doing this all in one take. If you're watching this take, this was take four; we went back and reshot it to make absolutely sure that everything I just said about Nebula was as precise and transparent as honest as possible. So thank you very much everybody, uh, and oh hey, if you do decide to get Nebula, go watch my movie, it just came out. Tell me what you think. Let me know what you think. Thanks very much. Goodbye. Okay, I mean, I think I think that's it. I think we got [Music] it.
Do the Angels Fall? Is there more to the? I don't know. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't think that I can figure out where my mind is trying to go, no more. No, no, no, no, no. I can't figure out if I could make it out this box. I like to clothe me with someone, get me out my head before it explode. I hate family pictures, family portraits. Had to look on that, keep trying to look strong, my smile look broke. On I be looking off to Jupiter, like Saturn going to give an answer to this pattern that I walk. R smells keep leaking out my memory box. Someone get it, CL. Someone get it, CL. When I find good things, they eventually rot. Someone say my soul, yeah. Someone say, "Must be the colors in the kids," cuz the music is a [ __ ] and all I see my mama screaming that I look like him. Must be the colors in the kids, cuz the music is a [ __ ] and all I see my mama screaming that I look like humdrum novelty days. I wash away like the rich through poverty stains my bloodline out of harmony. I'm hardly the same little kid who used to walk around with hard-on things. My bloodline full of bad denim, it's all knock-off Lis wishes. Bad memories, I throw them off to the SE. Buzz around, make a beeline, find and that, but I think these jeans in my blood got me tra. I call my dad, he's so proud that his son is like him. I'm scared to say that aloud. That thought is louder than doubt, that thought is louder than shouts that's falling out of your mouth. I want to shove them back in. You say I'm nothing like him, but you ain't looked at his face. I swear to God, be the same. I got his blood in my veins, I got his love in my brain, I got his face in my face, I got his smile and laugh [ __ ] hate that's a fact. Can [Applause] show if it does? Is it do the Angels? Is there more to the? I don't know. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Can the devil show it if it does? Is it real? All the angels falling up, is there something that can heal us? I don't know. I don't know. No, I don't know. No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't [Music] know.
In her book, *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*, sociologist Shana Zuboff said, "Say yes." Nailed it.