"While We Were Looking Over There" is the second 🏷️#podcast-episode of the 📝Everything They Know podcast, hosted by 📝Ari Andersen.
Ari opens on the ten-year whiplash from techno-optimism to a "society of depressed wizards," then two interviews: 📝Judy Estrin returns to trace how the problem metastasized — trust, friction, feeds, and the trade of agency for convenience — and 📝K. Krasnow Waterman, the post-9/11 data-analytics CIO, explains what the data actually makes possible.
Listen
Takeaways
From 📝Ari Andersen:
"To the ancient world, we'd seem like a society of depressed wizards. [...] We are the tools that technology is using to make itself smarter, more efficient, and more ubiquitous." [02:20]
tl;dr — Ten years ago technology was a tool for human beings; now the relationship has inverted.
Themes: the Faustian inversion · losing hope
From 📝Judy Estrin:
"My big thing is we need to go back to thinking of friction as a good thing. Not all friction, but you need some level of friction in the world. And we've now gotten ourselves to think everything should be frictionless, which then makes us more impatient." [16:46]
"The companies can't solve this. They can be part of the solution, but what we need as a society is to incentivize them to participate in a solution." [06:30]
"Society is a very important combination of strong personal autonomy, or liberty, and valuing interdependence. For societies to work, you don't want weak people — that's authoritarian. A healthy society wants strong individuals that feel secure enough to share power and value interdependence so that we can interact as a society. We're degrading both." [18:20]
"One of the interesting questions is the difference between speaking and being heard. We have the ability to speak more now — your voice is raised — but our ability to be heard is lessened because we're talking in a concert that everybody's yelling in and there's too much music." [23:00]
tl;dr — Technology stopped being a tool and started molding us: frictionlessness breeds impatience, feeds replaced exploration, and we traded agency for convenience — a loss you can't feel until it's too late.
Themes: 📝Friction as a Good Thing · trust at scale · agency for convenience
From 📝K. Krasnow Waterman:
"They show me their schematic and I look at it, and privacy is a zero-one bit. [...] They think it's a gate that is either opened or closed, that things are either inherently private or inherently not private. There's no nuance." [49:50]
"Lawyers are trained to write things to protect their clients. [...] It will always give you the benign happy example — it never says: we can collect everything you looked up about medicine and figure out our best guess as to what illness you have, because we're not bound by HIPAA." [58:30]
"By directing everything, we remove serendipity, we remove discovery." [71:50]
tl;dr — Privacy is not a bit, it's hundreds of thousands of contextual rules — and the permissions we grant routinely make surveillance repricing and curated reality technically trivial, whether or not anyone flips the switch.
Themes: computable privacy · mosaic theory · engineered serendipity loss
Timeline
- 00:00 — Ari's cold open: the ten-year whiplash; depressed wizards; we became the tools
- 03:30 — Estrin: no more offline vs. online; you can't opt out
- 06:30 — the companies can't solve this; incentives, not chief ethics officers
- 09:08 — privilege as not seeing harms; metrics can't measure goodness
- 12:50 — you can't scale trust; friends who are really strangers
- 16:46 — friction as a good thing; Trump as symptom, not cause
- 18:20 — strong autonomy + valued interdependence, both degrading
- 21:04 — small screens birthed the feed; platforms became curators
- 23:00 — speaking vs. being heard
- 24:40 — agency traded for convenience; push vs. pull; Uber vs. public infrastructure
- 33:04 — individual action vs. policy; friction and the generational raw deal
- 35:00 — Waterman: post-9/11 task force of 23 agencies; the 1984 article
- 39:05 — mosaic theory; demanding data digitally
- 49:50 — privacy as a zero-one bit; the Privacy Act's 135 sub-rules; the nurse example
- 55:04 — 100+-page terms of service; benign happy examples
- 61:01 — app permissions: all your texts, your calendar, repricing by demand
- 65:05 — the paradigm: tight rules for government, open season for private companies
- 71:04 — the Barron's guide and the college you weren't shown; serendipity removed
- 72:50 — close: Littlefinger's game — assume the worst, see how well it explains