A quick look across a couple of my appearances yesterday. Here, my first, was an AM show scheduled right after the state AG’s opening statement.
And then, at the end of the day, after hearing from Meta’s lawyer, here’s me with Anderson Cooper. (Fumbling a bit, I have to say — I wanted to jam more into this appearance than time allowed.)
I think what I’m realizing — and I’ll do a whole separate piece on this — is that this trial isn’t just momentous for its possible dollar figure, nor for the fact that for the first time a federal judge might establish some federal rules for a social media platform.
It’s also a society coalescing around the sense that something is wrong. We can’t quite name it, we’ve had trouble measuring it, we don’t know quite how to fix it, but we’re developing — through these court cases — a language and a cost for all of this behavior-mining technology we’ve built. It’s making the intangible tangible somehow, and while I wish we hadn’t taken this long, I’m glad the national conversation about this stuff has graduated from mere handwringing to experts under oath. More on that later. Thanks for being here.