"Don't Be Evil" is the first 🏷️#podcast-episode of the 📝Everything They Know podcast, hosted by 📝Ari Andersen.
Ari opens with the frame that carries the series: Harari's Faustian bargain between humans and grains, replayed as digital technology — trading 📝privacy, autonomy, and self-determination for convenience. Then two interviews: 📝Judy Estrin on what led 📝Silicon Valley astray, and 📝Andrew Keen on why he called it early.
Listen
Takeaways
From 📝Judy Estrin:
"It was about interconnecting diversity as opposed to everything having to be the same and big and powerful — that the way you succeeded was by connecting with others. You can think of it as collaborative as opposed to authoritarian." [09:05]
"When you're vertically integrated, the value accrues to the integrator. When you have open systems innovation, the value is spread more broadly." [14:09]
"You have success, and then you're rewarded for that momentum, and then people invest in you more. And unless you have the values, ethics, integrity to say, I'm not going to take that step — you end up where we are today." [17:01]
"You can't just say, oops, I broke democracy. Or oops, a plane crashed because I didn't test that software. Or oops, there was a genocide because my social network spread fake information." [18:11]
tl;dr — The internet's founding philosophy was 📝open systems — interconnecting diversity — and the tragedy is that social, mobile, and cloud reverted to the vertically integrated model the internet had escaped.
Themes: open systems innovation · incentives over intent · 📝Ignoring the Harm
From 📝Andrew Keen:
"We transform our culture from one of listening into speaking. And that means that we lose the essential qualities of a good democracy and a good culture, which is listening." [39:00]
"It's a fear of the cultural and political and indeed economic consequences of a platform-dominated culture where all the money goes to the platform owners. None of it really goes to the creators." [40:48]
tl;dr — The Cult of the Amateur argument, sixteen years on: give everyone a platform without a business model and you drown the experts, starve the creators, and trade a culture of listening for a culture of speaking.
Themes: platform economics · listening over speaking
Timeline
- 00:00 — Ari's cold open: Harari's Faustian bargain, agriculture then, digital technology now
- 04:00 — Estrin: internet origins, infrastructure vs. the applications built on it
- 09:05 — interconnecting diversity; open systems innovation; collaborative vs. authoritarian
- 13:00 — the 2011 slide: social, mobile, cloud at the fork; the return to vertical integration
- 15:00 — scale technologies and network effects; discovery positions leveraged into market after market
- 17:01 — incentives, values, and "move fast and break things"
- 21:00 — investors and boom-bust cycles; blitzscaling; 📝WeWork as caricature
- 23:30 — how targeted advertising became the business model
- 25:30 — mission creep and obfuscation; tobacco, opioid, and sugar parallels
- 29:03 — ignoring the harm; leaders who "don't care enough about what makes us human"
- 30:20 — Keen: emperor's-new-clothes, Web 2.0, Cult of the Amateur
- 39:00 — listening vs. speaking; platform economics
- 42:30 — close: "it may get worse before it gets better"