Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, it clearly is. There is stuff happening on Twitter that was impossible with books. And I really regret that Twitter has not taken the turn that I was hoping for. I thought Elon is global brain-pilled and understands that this thing needs to self-organize and he needs to develop tools to allow the profligation of the self-organization so Twitter can become sentient.
And maybe this was a pipe dream from the beginning, but I felt that the enormous pressure that he was under made it impossible for him to work on any kind of content goals. And also many of the decisions that he made under this pressure seemed to be not very wise. I don't think that as a CEO of a social media company, you should have opinions in the culture of our own public.
I think that's very short-sighted. And I also suspect that it's not a good idea to block Paul Graham, of all people, over setting a Mastodon link. And I think Paul made this intentionally because he wanted to show Elon Musk that blocking people for setting a link is completely counter to any idea of free speech that he intended to bring to Twitter.
Basically, seeing that Elon was way less principled in his thinking there and is much more experimental. Many of the things that he is trying, they pan out very differently in a digital society than they pan out in a car company. Because the effect is very different. Because everything that you do in a digital society is going to have real-world cultural effects.
Basically, I find it quite regrettable that this guy is... able to become de facto the Pope, where Twitter has more active members than the Catholic Church. And he doesn't get it.
The power and responsibility that he has and the ability to create something in this society that is lasting and that is producing a digital agora in a way that has never existed before, where we built a social network on top of a social network, an actual society on top of the algorithms. So this is something that is hope still in the future and still in the cards.
But it's something that exists in small parts. I find that the corner of Twitter that I'm in is extremely pleasant. It's just when I take a few steps outside of it, it is not very wholesome anymore. And the way in which people interact with strangers suggests that it's not a civilized society yet.
Yes, but there's also a similar thing in the normal world. That is, if you become more influential, if you have more status, if you have more fame in the real world, you get lots of perks, but you also have way less freedom in the way in which you interact with people, especially with strangers, because...
a certain percentage of people, it's a small single digit percentage, is nuts and dangerous. And the more of those are looking at you, the more of them might get ideas.
Obviously, I can do this because we know each other. And Lee has the rare gift of being willing to be wrong in public. So basically, he has thoughts that are as wrong as the random thoughts of an average, highly intelligent person. But he blurts them out while not being sure if they're right. And he enjoys doing that.
And once you understand that this is his game, you don't get offended by him saying something that you think is so wrong.
It already does in some sense. But also, if it elevates them too much, then you get this phenomenon in Clubhouse where you always get dragged on stage. And I found this very stressful because it was too intense. I don't like to be dragged on stage all the time. I think once a week is enough. And
Also, when I met Lee the first time, I found that a lot of people seemed to be shocked by the fact that he was being very aggressive with their results, that he didn't seem to show a lot of sensibility in the way in which he was criticizing what they were doing and being dismissive of the work of others.
And that was not, I think, in any way a shortcoming of him because I noticed that he was much, much more dismissive with respect to his own work. It was his general stance. And I felt that this general stance is creating a lot of liability for him because really a lot of people
take offense at him being not like a Dale Carnegie character who is always smooth and make sure that everybody likes him. So I really respect that he is willing to take that risk and to be wrong in public and to offend people. And he doesn't do this in any bad way. It's just most people feel or not all people recognize this.
And so I can be much more aggressive with him than I can be with many other people who don't play the same game because he understands the way and the spirit in which I respond to him.
I was very lucky to be alive at the time of the collapse of Eastern Germany and the transition into Western Germany. And me and my friends and most of the people I knew were East Germans. And we were very poor because we didn't have money.
And all the capital was in Western Germany and they bought our factories and shut them down because they were mostly only interested in the market rather than creating new production capacity. And so cities were poor and in disrepair and we could not afford things. And I could not afford to go into a restaurant and order a meal there. I would have to cook at home.
But I also thought, why not just have a restaurant with my friends? So we would open up a cafe with friends in a restaurant and we would cook for each other in these restaurants and also invite the general public and they could donate and Eventually, this became so big that we could turn this into some incorporated form and it became a regular restaurant at some point.
Or we did the same thing with a movie theater. We would not be able to afford to pay 12 marks to watch a movie, but why not just create our own movie theater and then invite people to pay and we would rent the movies in the way in which a movie theater does.
Showing 481–500 of 510 · page 25 of 26
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