No Kings and New Progressives

My friend Matt and I have been talking a lot recently about free speech, politics, and the insanity of the world generally. Let me be clear: the world is insane, but not as insane as many believe.

There’s this core group of us who are now alienated, unaffiliated moderates who are just watching everyone else going “wtf is happening.“ We have been riffing on what the 25-30 year old male perspective is on these things, and (in my opinion) this is one of the most interesting categories to look at when it comes to politics. We grew up post 9/11 in a world of constant conflict both internally to our country and externally.

Here are some of the ideas we (and I in particular) have been thinking about:

Social Media Regulation - Regulating the Algorithm

As a technologist and product expert, the current state of social media is serving too many purposes. It’s both 1) an entertainment platform and 2) a town square. The problem comes when you start to try to optimize the town square part for entertainment - the result is tons of rage and drama in the world broadcast everywhere.

One thing is clear: we must maintain our rights to free speech. I might disagree with people, but it does not mean I have a right to silence them. Instead, to preserve individual freedoms we need to regulate the algorithms, especially for the platforms that are serving as town squares. Once you give the user freedom of choice - the users will regulate themselves against extremism and back to rationality.

What this means is that we need to build digital town square platforms and content rules where the user can control what they see in terms of diversity of opinions, but where no one is silenced. Some might find this offensive, but if you want to say trump has a small d*ck or we didn’t go to the moon, go ahead, I just don’t want to see or hear about it. Each individual can reject those ideas while still maintaining the basic principle of freedom of ideas - in fact it’s our responsibility to seek the truth and morality while still allowing every idea.

It’s the same way we allow people from all walks of life to show up and protest peacefully - speech != violence. Platforms that don’t force harmful content on users but allow them to see what they want to see when they want to see it.

Then, we need to create separate entertainment platforms that serve a purpose as a place essentially the “comedy central of the internet“ places people can go where they know it’s entertainment and not reality. There are also separate standards of truth for both ideas / platforms that are critical to maintaining a common narrative, otherwise we just devolve.

If someone just listens to comedy central for their news, of course they’re going to be a complete idiot. The problem is that the major source of semi-factual information in the world is coming from instagram bites, which are a terrible view on the reality of the world.

Believing in free speech isn’t extremism - it’s literally the first rule the founders of our country decided to write down and is our main defense against abuse of power.

Back to Rule of Law

A few general problems I see in our society:

1. Some areas of the country have zero law enforcement in the sense that there are police who don’t show up when someone is being assaulted. Over the past 2 months I’ve heard of 4 cases in Oakland / East Bay / San Francisco where someone was chased with a knife, ran up to a police car, and the police rolled down the window responded with “what am I supposed to do?“ (or equivalent)

2. We’ve weaponized the law to retroactively enforce things that weren’t previously considered crimes. When a peace officer or business owner asks “can I do this based on how I’m regulated?“ you need clear rules of the road that are only enforced going forward to protect the people who take risks to keep us all safe. When Elon Musk wants to build a new rocket launchpad, we can’t retroactively say “this isn’t good for the environment, therefore you need to throw away this money spent“ - clear rule making is key to this concept, not retroactively though only going forward

I think this means an overhaul of our justice system back to moderate judges who consider the law as-written and don’t insert their own extremism. Firing the people in places who don’t enforce rule of law.

Ultimately the law isn’t meant to harm people - it’s meant to force responsibility and do justice. We need to refocus on that concept over the violence that the system has been used for over the past ~5 years.

Return to Faith

I think every democratic candidate who has been run of recent memory has been affiliated with some religion. There’s a difference between “I was raised xyz“ and the visceral feeling of “this is a person of faith.“ I’d love to see a return to those values. I don’t think many of us care about a specific religion (some do) but I do think most care about a believe in a greater good / truth / purpose and that foundation for life that builds.

Modern Progressivism

We need a return to the American dream of “work hard, do good, and you will be rewarded“ - the truth is that this is natural law, but we’ve moved from those ideals to ones of entitlement where your identity can buy you certain rights in society.

Don’t get me wrong: use your freedom of individuality to be yourself. That doesn’t endow someone with more or less rights, freedoms or privileges that others. We are all equal so we should act like it.

No Kings

Right now it’s true that there is a one-party rule of the country. It is also true that there is one-party rule of California, just a different party. Single party rule doesn’t work - it always devolves to the worst of human nature. The solution though isn’t to fight the other side, it’s to surrender to this fact: we can’t change the other side but we can change ourselves. We need to remove the leaders who took us down this path and elevate new ones who are more in line with the ideals that represent us, otherwise we are represent(less) which is a bad place to be.