James Talarico

They have created for-profit platforms with these predatory algorithms that divide us on an hourly, daily basis, dividing us by party, by race, by gender, by religion.

And they elevate the most extreme voices very strategically and

to provoke our outrage, to provoke our anger, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for them.

Because anger sells, hate sells, fear sells.

These billionaires and their platforms are engineering our emotions so they can profit off of our pain.

They are selling us conflict and they're calling it connection.

It's almost like feeding someone empty calories.

And I think it's left people starving for actual community, for real relationship.

Well, and the business model depends on us leaving behind our real human relationships.

The biggest competitor to these platforms, to meta, is actually not TikTok.

It's not X. It's not Snapchat.

It is real human relationship.

And that should be terrifying.

We have a whole economy now built on keeping us in our rooms, on our phones for as many hours in the day as possible.

And so their competitors are church and neighborhoods and pubs.

It is the actual, messy, complicated, beautiful human relationships that we require to live.

And I think it's something we don't talk about enough.

We're seeing the effects of it every day in our own lives and the lives of people we love.

But I don't think we recognize how this is destroying us from the inside out.

I've been accused of demonizing billionaires, and I want to be really clear that that's not what I'm doing.