Dex Hunter-Torricke

I mean, it's not the most wild scheme ever invented.

But the failure to engage with a whole bunch of other things which are within his power and which are playing out on the platforms, that can end up exerting tremendous evil in the world.

So it's something where there's, again, this great duality about these things, right?

And you can be an engineer working at Facebook, and every day you go in there and you work on things that are really, really boring, designed to sort of incrementally improve user experience, and they do improve user experience, and yet you are also part of an institution that might also be doing things which in some other part of this vast global machine

actually aren't effects you like at all.

And you still need people to go and do the good things as well, right?

You know, all institutions are imperfect and there's lots of good people, I think, who work within tech companies because they are driven by nothing more than they want to build systems that really do solve problems for people.

I think it was both.

People are desperate for heroes.

And I moved to New York in 2008, right on the eve of the economic crisis unfolding.

And how many more crises have we been through since then?

It's like the 21st century has been a never ending series of disasters befalling most of the world.

And in that context, people will always look for heroes.

We're looking for good guys and bad guys.

We're looking for a simplistic narrative to make sense of deeply complex events.

Who were the good guys in the economic crisis?

There were lots of different bad guys.

There were lots of different shades of gray every single day.

But the real villains weren't even just these individuals.

We would sort of say, ah, that person's going to prison, right?