This simple idea that there have always been places where people gathered because water was so dangerous that you get sick from drinking water.

So the safest thing to drink in England, as in America, was alcoholic beverages.

They would drink ale and other alcoholic beverages, and that leads to a certain kind of social life.

A certain kind of intellectual life, you might say, and a simple change.

The discovery of coffee of the importation of it changed the nature of social interaction.

Obviously, to go from a depressant to a stimulant, you get more interesting conversations.

We're at a similar turning point.

Now.

We are several years into a transition that may be much bigger.

And that is, of course, the transition from intellectual life based on face to face interactions, publishing in journals, in physical build meeting and physical buildings to a virtual world in which a lot happens online at a very, very different timescale.

It's a very interesting time to be thinking about intellectual life and what a 21st century enlightenment would look like?

That's the big question people are asking here at the R S.

A.

And so when I was invited, I was told in November the artist they will be celebrating the next phase in our history of opening a 21st century Enlightenment coffeehouse.

Now here's the line, though that concerned me.

We want to create opportunities for people from every background in discipline, to join together, to exchange ideas and experiences, to debate the big challenges facing us as a society undergoing rapid change amid a turbulent politics and to work together toward a more enlightened future.

And what I recognize in this invitation text is this way of looking at the world.

This is one of most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

John Lennon's imagine is a World in which, if we could just get rid of the things that divide us, all of us, just living life in peace together would not be great.

And this is a vision that tends to resonate on the left.

In particular, there is a very noble sentiment.

There is a truth to it, but I think as it plays out, it tends not toe work.

For reasons that seem unexpected, but actually are quite expectable.

And that's what I want to talk to you about.

Today.

I'm gonna offer you a metaphor of society, and here it is.

The Titanic was built to be unsinkable.

They built it with these watertight compartments, even if actually four where to be punctured in to fill with water there are bound because there are barriers won't flood.

The ship won't sink, so we can go really fast through the icebergs.

It's unsinkable.

As you know, the iceberg created a gash across several of the compartments.

Several compartments were flooded immediately by the iceberg.

So, in other words, had the compartments been truly watertight, it probably would not have sunk.

So here's a guy a youtuber named Raja Liston.

In his bathtub, he took a plastic model of the Titanic.

He created 16 compartments.

He put coins in each of the compartments.

As weight as you can see, you put a kind of a gash roughly where the gash was in the hall of the Titanic.

So you see the water as it spills over one compartment, the front goes down further, and then that increases the speed at which water goes to the next compartment, which increases etcetera and at first, the dipping a slow.

But in the end, it's very fast, so that's my metaphor for you.

All right, let's apply the metaphor.

So Facebook's mission in 2004 their mission statement was to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected in 2017.

When they discovered that simply connecting the world can change major American elections.

They updated their mission.

Now, they say, to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

The company itself is engaged in some very bad practices, but the people, I believe, are generally a good people, ethical people.

This was a simple image back in 2010 by Facebook intern plotting out how Facebook is connecting the world.

And, of course, it's vastly more connected now than it was in 2010.

These are just some images of networks.

What kind of society is a better society, one in which there are people who are disconnected entirely, or one in which everyone's connected indirectly, or one which everyone's directly connected and you might think, well, the more connections the better.

But there a few problems with that that if 99% of people are really good and you connect everybody, you still can get all kinds of terrible things happening.

The altar right, pioneered or developed ways of using the Internet to provoke people for fun.

It's It's humorous, but it produces.

It expresses nasty sentiments.

The Internet can be used to harass people.

This is what I'm most alarmed about.

It's not arguments that take place.

It's actual threats.

Intimidation, death threats, rape threats, horrible racist rants.

Eso You're unleashing all kinds of nastiness when you connect everybody, especially if there's anonymity.

Obviously manipulators.

Cambridge Analytica may have influenced elections using Facebook data.

A study A very important study done in science by a group at M I t.

Uh, Deb Roy Slab found that when they looked at how information spread on Twitter, what they found is that false information, especially if it's emotionally evocative, spreads faster than true.

And, yes, Russian bots forwarded this sort of stuff.

But if you take all the Russian bots out, it doesn't actually make a difference, because essentially, in America we hate each other so much that we're all Russian bots happily forwarding nasty fake stuff about the other side.

The net effect, according to some people, including some of the founders of Facebook and other social media companies, is that social media is ripping apart society.

That certainly is the way it feels.

And so we're beginning to ask questions in the last two years that says, Can liberal democracy even survive social media?

The existence of governments and social social democracies as we know them is not a sure thing, as it was just four years ago.

When you connect people in this way, expect unexpected problems.

Networks are complicated, important things.

But if you knock down all the walls or the walls fail, if you connect everybody in this way, you're gonna have some unexpected problems.

Secondly, the 21st century enlightenment, like anything else about social engineering, is very, very hard to predict.