In mid-2017, Mo Lotmon spoke to journalist and media critic Bill Powers. Powers authored a bestselling book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry, about stepping away from tech. Powers was one of the first to publicly and loudly speak about the need to get away from “screens” and move to have “screen Sabbaths.”
At the time he spoke to Mo Lotman, Powers was at MIT’s Media Lab trying to increase the quality of social media. Powers is now at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
(Editors Note: In listening to this a few times in preparing to re-release it in 2024, it is hard to ignore that Powers’ 2017 optimism about the ability of social media to be moved in a positive direction did not pan out. He noted that in working at the MIT media lab, the technologists, i.e. the people who ran Twitter, were humanized to him. Once he got to know them, he realized they saw the problems their tools had created.
But did they, really?
Seven years later, the only changes at Twitter (now X) and Facebook (now Meta) are purely cosmetic. Yes, there have been some changes to content moderation algorithms-but those algorithms are still optimized to deliver toxic yet addictive sludge. Very probably, social media can’t be less disruptive to society and mental health, as long as social media’s business model is to harvest attention to sell ads and collect user info to sell to data brokers.)
William Powers-Journalist and Media Critic