Balaji Srinivasan

This is something where whatever you – if you actually model it, right, NYT was the center.

And how would you know something about Japan in the 1980s or the 1990s or the early 2000s?

NYT would have a reporter, and they would present it to you because you'd have a description to NYT.

And how do you know about what's going on in Turkey or in the nuclear industry?

hub and they would essentially intermediate everybody's perception of each other, like a hall of mirrors in the center.

The Japanese guy would only know through one of these centralized news agencies, right?

So you think of it, they call it the media in part because it mediates your experience of reality.

It's like a shimmery mirror into the shimmery hall of mirrors.

And of course, that power of controlling that centralized hall of mirrors where everybody perceives everybody else through this smoky looking glass

This is why they were so, so, so, so, so, you know, insistent.

They fought this bruising and ultimately losing battle.

They tried to use their centralized power to censor everybody and to stop people in particular from courting with each other.

Do you remember all the freakouts, Eric, about clubhouse?

Like people from different walks of life.

Unfettered conversations.

Unfettered conversations, exactly.

Why?

Because what it meant was all the spokes, right?

You know...

celebrity and some tech person and, I don't know, some, I don't know, French guy or something like that, Japanese businessman, could actually all have a, you know, coffee table, like what we're doing right now, right, in digital space and talk to each other without a member of the party, MIT official, essentially, like the Communist Party official, but I repeat myself, there to monitor what we were saying, right?