Tim Wu

And I feel that makes using it kind of like living in a funhouse.

So I want to make sure I give voice to somebody who is not in the show at the moment, because this is going to have the flavor of three middle-aged guys who think the internet went wrong somewhere along the way.

When I was working on this episode with my producer, one of the interesting tensions beyond the scenes was she doesn't think the internet is bad.

She thinks TikTok is, as she said, a perfect platform.

She's young kids and feels Amazon is a godsend for a young parent.

Obviously, there are many people like this who are using these platforms freely of their own volition, happily.

So what do you say to somebody who says, what are you fucking all talking about?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll start.

I think that...

The middle-aged thing used to be better, which is I don't want to fall into that sort of situation.

I just think the deal is not what it could be.

And I think that maybe as a consumer who sort of lightly uses this, the internet is still useful.

But if people, I mean, I have children too.

And I think it's hard to deny that social media is,

has been tough on kids and has had all kinds of negative effects on that.

And that really started accelerating over the last 15 years or so.

I think we have a highly polarized political structure, which is made worse by social media.

I think we have a problem with inequality, which has gotten worse and worse and is accentuated by the fact that the margins are just so thin for independent business.

And I also think this vision

that it would be this equalizer, leveler, this technology that made a lot of people rich, not just a few people rich, that it was more or less reasonable and a lucrative thing to do to start your own business, that it would sort of change some of the challenges of inequality and class structure in the United States.