So this talk has four parts.
- In the first part, I'll say why I think the problem with meaning and the problem with togetherness — why these are actually one problem. This “meaning versus taste” thing and this “individual versus collective” thing—I think it's the same problem. Connecting them makes it clearer why this long term downward trend in togetherness and meaning has happened. What is it structurally, in the economy and on the internet, that keeps things getting meaningless at scale. It has to do with how we’ve scaled up society using mechanisms like markets and recommender systems.
The other three chapters are about what to do about it. I think we can reverse this centuries-long trend. But we have to look really deeply into it.
- So, in the second part, I'll go deep on what meaning is. What's meaningful to people? How is giving them meaning different from giving them the rare blue jeans, they're looking for? Or the rare kind of video they're looking for? That's section two.
- In the third part, I want to look at questions of entrepreneurship and design. What kinds of social networks would be meaningful for creativity? or for vulnerability? What kinds of bars are meaningful for hanging out? How do you make one? A focus on meaning and togetherness requires a different approach to design and to entrepreneurship. I’ll illustrate this approach by redesigning twitter with a focus on meaning.
- In the last section I’ll build on all that, to talk about reversing the long term trend. Some of the same tools I use in the third part can be used to rebuild large scale structures like recommender systems, markets, and social media. I’ll give an example of redesigning TikTok, to make it better at surfacing meaning-based projects. I hope that, by making similar changes to markets, recommenders, and social networks, we can reverse the long-term trend away from meaning and togetherness.
- This, I'll argue, would create many second order benefits: it would increase progress in science, restore democracies and education systems, etc.