Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash.
Medium founder and CEO on technology, society, and the choices ahead.
Since 2012, Ev Williams has been focusing on Medium, the publishing platform he built after co-founding Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and later the blogging tool Blogger. He has pivoted Medium to what we know today, with a focus on “high-quality publishing at scale,” as he recently wrote.
But Ev has been thinking deeply about the nature of technology and how it relates to all of us for quite some times. Exactly one year ago, he declared: “I think the Internet is broken. […] I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place.”
I was wrong about that.
Is the Internet broken?_The co-founder of Medium and Twitter on the path forward._hackernoon.com
His search for a path forward for technology and the Internet has not stopped.
“Humans are humans, and society is full of good and bad actors (and lots of people who are both good and bad depending on the situation),” he wrote in what Kevin Roose of The New York Times called a “mini-manifesto.”
In the two-page document, Ev explains how “Technology, at the most fundamental level, empowers people.”
“It lets them do things more easily,” he adds. “So, for instance, if they want to seek and share knowledge . . . The Internet is the most amazing invention ever. If they want to disrupt and upset people and spread lies and cruelty . . . Wow, it’s pretty good for that too.”
These are unintended consequences of technology. But how can we cope with the bad side?
“I would still rather have the world with these tools than without them, and I think a lot of people underestimate how fundamentally interlinked the good and bad consequences of powerful tools are,” Ev writes.
Medium’s founder says one of the problems is the seemingly free Internet model, where everything we use, every key platforms seems free to users.
“As internet users, and even as an industry, we got used to everything being free, and we underestimated the cost of that,” Ev says. “Because it wasn’t really free — it cost billions of dollars. We just weren’t paying for it out of pocket. Without consciously agreeing to it, we made a collective bet 25 years ago that the information-access part of the internet could be provided free to everyone and paid for by advertising.”
It worked so well we doubled down on that bet every year since.
He admits that wasn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do as the ad-based model funded a thriving ecosystem. But now we see problems piling up with related models that prefer quantity over quality.
“The good news is, this is starting to shift” with content creators charging end users, he points out.
However, some of the problems are not tech-specific, they relate to human interactions.
“If you want to have systems which let the whole world talk to each other, freely and easily, across time and distance […] there are going to be bad people having bad interactions,” he says. “That’s not something you can fully solve with humans or machine or regulation. And it’s not probably not something that has anything to do with ads.”
So, the question is not just if the Internet is broken… The question is whether we can fix it. And it does not all come down to regulation.
“We’d need to narrow down what part of tech we’re trying to ‘fix’,” he mentions in his manifesto. “Misinformation, certain types of abuse, and other issues we are fretting about are arguably much more complex and harder to automate for,” he adds while making an example of how technology solved the spam problem.
How to fix technology and the Internet is still an open question. And more questions need to be answered, Ev says.
“To me, some of the most important questions there are things like: will we make sure that the regulations are written with a deeply considered understanding of how the technology works, and be careful to avoid models based on prior technologies? Are we creating an environment that favors large companies, which are often the best at leveraging complex laws to beat out innovators and insurgents? Are we causing new companies to try and slot themselves into regulatory models in order to avoid risk, rather than innovating in line with their vision for the product?”