Patrick McKenzie: commitment

Transcript context

…Maybe that's the crux here. Your story of VaccinateCA illustrates the lack of accountability in our institutions. It seems fanciful that we can go back to Congress and pass some law. We have KYC/AML. We realized that with LLMs, it's going to be a bad deal with regards to privacy. We're going to roll that back. We don't like the collusion between tech and whoever's in power. We don’t like this ability to dictate what can get taken off the platform. We think that's free speech and we're going to pass laws and take that back. There's no sense in which society has come to a consensus about the privacy and free speech concerns we have. By at least one argument, the solution is that you just start new rails for these things that cannot be constrained in this way. It's not a matter of just changing the KYC law. Rather, that's implausible given the manifest declining state capacity we've talked about. I don't accept that it is the only thing possible for us. I don't accept that the United States is incapable of doing nice things. We can't accept that. We have to be optimistic about the future. Otherwise, what are we doing here? In the tech industry, we know it is not a physical law of reality or of large institutions that one cannot make systems that work. Making systems that work is the job. We have a few existence proofs. We should increase our engagement with government. Hey state capacity, we can help you build some of that stuff. Also, the Constitution of the United States is a document we feel attached to. Again, incentives rule everything around us. In early 2021, the tech industry was very concerned about being told in no uncertain way by people in power, "if you embarrass us, we'll end you." One thing in the judicial record of this case is that the White House and other government actors routinely overreached and asked the tech companies, "we would like you to censor this and this and this." The tech companies said no in a bunch of cases. It’s important to continue to negotiate for the right outcome rather than the one that people in power merely want. There are some things that will feel unfortunate and maybe a little bit outside of our true sweet spot of what we would want to be doing on a Tuesday in tech. Maybe we have to ratchet up the amount of public policy advocacy that we do. Lobbying is a dirty word in the tech industry. It probably shouldn't be. When the "do not embarrass us" order came down, people were getting very quiet about the fact of feeling constrained by this. Maybe we should have spoken out more and spoken more boldly about it. It was the routine case that the White House was telling Facebook, Twitter, etc. to censor on a tweet by tweet, communication by communication basis. This is also with regards to broad rules that affected the residents of the United States and also everyone else in the world. These are the operating systems of the world. They were giving direct orders on, "there's a certain kind of speech act which we find vexatious and we would like you to stop that everywhere. " Very plausibly, we should get on the nightly news and say, "I received the following email from the White House that says we should stop this everywhere.” If you point a gun at me, I will comply with this at the point of a gun. That is what it will take. It almost requires civil disobedience. Say you’re right that in 2021, there were going to be serious political repercussions on the tech companies. Say they publish this email, “here's what the White House just sent me to take down this tweet.” Now, Twitter's market cap has just collapsed because people realize the political implications of what Jack Dorsey just got up and said at the time. Then the solution is that you need tech companies to basically sacrifice their capacity to do business. Maybe that is a solution, but that's not a story about optimism about the ability of the US government to solve problems this way.…

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