The Rewards of Stepping Out of Line: A Commencement Address from Kara 27:26

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on!

Hi everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is the nuclear physicist named Barbie. I'm just kidding, this is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm going to make it short and sweet. Since you're about to hear a lot from me via this commencement address I gave at the Cooper Union to its graduating students in May. For those who don't know the school, it was founded in 1859 and gives degrees in art, architecture, and engineering, and is a

which is presumably why they asked me, really old lady of tech. This is my first college commencement speech. I did a high school graduation once, but college is the big time and also a place where you can stumble easily as a speaker and giver of wisdom for life and be instantly forgettable.

I don't recall who spoke at either my graduation from Georgetown University or Columbia University way back in the last century. So to be more useful, I tried to talk about what was facing graduates as they entered the world now. We'll see if it sticks. Here's the speech. And now it is my honor to present our commencement speaker, Kara Swisher. Wow, this is totally undeserved.

Anyway, whatever. Thank you so much. There's going to be no living with me now, but there was no living with me before, so oh well. I don't know how you think I look. I think I look like a really intellectual hobbit.

with this outfit on. I am wearing my hard pants for you under this. I never wear hard pants, so you should appreciate that. But I am wearing a soft hat that I actually stole. Don't tell anybody. I'm sure it is undeserved, and I think it's for PhD people. I did not get a PhD. Please tweet that so the right wing can attack me more today.

The lesbian from San Francisco stole her academic achievement hat, and she's probably going to take it home with her and give it to her three-year-old daughter. In any case, I love all the cosplaying going on here. You all look great. Again, very San Francisco. More color is needed, though, I suspect.

I like the mace, I'm going to take that too when I leave. I could use it for the people I cover. But I do want to start talking about, I didn't realize the last part of Cooper Union is science and art, which is a famous phrase that Steve Jobs always used, and it's a critically important one.

for this speech that I'm about to give. I love the idea of science and art, and it's too often ignored in technology, all the time. In fact, all the time ignored. It has been for the past 20 years, especially since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011. I actually have many tattoos, but two of them are...

This is, I forget which one, this is entropy and centropy. They combine together, it's chaos and construction, which I think is an apt thing because it's really important to think about the two when you're thinking about what I'm gonna talk about

And before I get to the heart of the address, let me begin by answering one question of the current moment that I have been asked about a lot, not succession, and I assume is on your mind too since you invited a tech type here, and this is the story dominating the industry right now. Will the new iteration of AI, now widely called generative artificial intelligence, eventually become self-aware and then kill all of humanity because it's the logical thing to do? LAUGHTER

The short answer, I'm sorry to report, is yes. Or no. Maybe. Probably. Probably. But let's put a pin in that in this upcoming reality show about the human race. We can call it The Last of Us and get back to that in the end because it's an important issue.

Aside from a speech I gave to the graduating seniors at the Long Island High School where I went until fifth grade, which I told the seniors headed to college to not do their largely useless homework anymore and to look up instead, parents did not like this, it should come as no surprise

This is my first commencement address and perhaps my last after you've heard me out. So thank you for the kind invitation in advance for whatever I happen to say. Sometimes I prepare, this time I did, usually I don't, I may not at some point in this procedure. I also know I'm supposed to say something at the start about these institutions' leaders and the other assorted muckety-mucks.

That's a technical term, by the way. Gathered here behind me, there's the muckities and the mucks, as well as your parents and various and sundry people coming to see you. Wish you well. But let me stress from the start, this is not for them at all. It is for you. So apologies to them in advance, too. Okay, I'm apologizing to everyone. I'm actually going to take off my glasses. I didn't realize I had them on. Time for some intimacy. Time for some intimacy now. Okay. It's us, kids.

And I can say kids because I'm super old. Anyway, I'm not someone who in fact apologizes a lot, which is perhaps one of the key distinguishing characteristics of my success over the years. Other attributes include obnoxiousness, persnicketiness, a distaste for lies, a proclivity to call out nonsense no matter the power of the person uttering it. In fact, especially if the person is powerful. That's my favorite part.

This is most commonly called speaking truth to power, and I highly recommend it. While it can be risky in most cases, the benefits are manifold, and the rewards both psychic and sometimes financial. It's worked for me to step out of line and to do so frequently. It is certainly easier in a democratic country like the US. Many others do not have this unique privilege.

But this is where we are, lucky people, who we are. And as I said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, I mentor a lot of people, especially young people like yourselves, and almost every single one of them is worried about stepping out, losing their place if they step out of line. And I'm like, the only way you get higher in life is if you step out of line.

That's the only way, seriously. Unless you're like untalented, then you should stay in line. And find your talent that will allow you to step out of line. And I certainly have made a career out of stepping out of line. Nothing against the untalented, but there's

There's so many of them. I certainly made a career out of-- not here, not at all, none. And did so when I gave up my path to power at the Washington Post on the political beat. I was headed right to the top on that beat, which made me nauseous, to start covering the nascent sector in the 1990s that was quaintly called digital online services. It's a real-- falls off your tongue nicely.

It sounded so harmless back then, and I was not much older than you when I first started on this so-called internet beat, which turned out to be the privilege of my life, since it turns out I love tech. I breathe tech, and most of all, I truly believed in tech's ability to transform the world in ways unimaginable and to solve problems that have plagued us for centuries in medicine, in education, in allowing us to finally see our commonality over all our differences.

As Annie Dillard wrote, "How we spend our lives, of course, is how we spend our days, and this is precisely how I wanted to spend mine." So let me begin with a story back in the Dark Ages, known as the 20th century. During a short fellowship at Duke University, I had a revelation: I was sitting in front of a computer and logged onto the nascent World Wide Web -- we used the whole term then, we don't use it at all now -- and experienced firsthand its awesome power to deliver content and all kinds of information.

So what was the first thing I did? I downloaded a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon collection. For those not familiar, it's about a six-year-old boy and his relationship to a mordant stuffed tiger. Brilliant stuff. Did I care even slightly that I managed to jam up the computer network of the university doing it? I did not.

But the system administrator, a young man already sporting a proto-techie slash seventh grader look, was pissed at me. You clogged up everything he chastised me. But I downloaded a whole book pretty much just by punching a button. I said to him, a whole book for fuck's sake. I'm allowed to say fuck, she said so. But that's what I said.

Big deal, he said, flashing me a Girls Can't Code scowl that I would come to know so well. I couldn't code at the time, but I knew something that this geek did not seem to grok. A book could be all books. A song could be all songs. A movie could be all movies. It was right there where I came up with a concept that would carry me on for decades, hence and does to this day.

Everything that can be digitized will be digitized. It's just the truth. Put a pin in that too because this has turned out to be true, we now know, but at the time it was a mind-blowing concept, one of those moments in humanity that raided with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the television, and like those inventions, it was nothing short of miraculous and as it turned out, disastrous.

I'm not, to be clear, saying this as if I was some grumpy old man shaking his fist at the Internet, telling it to get off my lawn. I am, as I said, a fan, a big fan of tech.

But I'm also not ignorant of how what I loved has gotten terribly warped over the decades. And that is why I'm glad you invited me, because I've always appreciated the audience at Cooper Union and the ability to integrate science and art together, including my last time here interviewing Representative Ro Khanna in early 2022 about the damage and dangers of tech to the wider society and need for government intervention before it got really scary.

Let me be clear, it's already scary. It was at the time, too. And now scarier still, including how it's affected the youngest among us. A new report yesterday from the Surgeon General cited a, quote, profound risk of harm due to the proliferation of social media content.

which has been, let me be clear, dead obvious for a very long time. Thank you, Surgeon General, for weighing in finally 20 years later. That has been aided by empty promises by elected officials who've taken no action a quarter century into the internet age, having managed to pass exactly zero legislation to protect you and me and the democratic institutions that we hold dear that crumble in the face of enragement all this digital engagement has wrought.

No privacy protections, no updated antitrust laws, no algorithmic transparency requirement, no guidelines that govern all the major sectors of the rest of the economy. However flawed, there are laws for everything but the tech companies. They are the richest and most powerful people on the planet, and their companies are the biggest on the planet. And they still have no rules guiding them by us, the people.

Because I and many others started to articulate this simple thing out loud in recent years, there are many who consider me a vehement tech critic. One recently called me the most vitriolic voice in the sector. I was surprised he knew that word. And some of them think I can be too negative about these fabulous Silicon Valley innovations that we should be thankful for them giving us. A few even consider me an enemy of the new digital world order, and I'm determined to take it down.

There was even one golden geek who dismissed me as a, quote, bummer. Recently, Elon Musk emailed to tell me I'm an asshole. I...

I consider that a compliment for the man who's vying to be the supervillain of the Bond movie we're now living in. But because of what I did to deserve these labels was to suggest that perhaps one should not create products without some safety tools in place. I pondered that perhaps anticipating consequences was important. I suggested all this online rage might just impact the real world. I suggested the world's richest and most powerful people not be

Well, professional trolls for whom the rules do not apply, diminishing us all with their toxic toddler antics. They are professional toddlers right now. Actually, my children behave better. It's because this is how an adult, which you are now, must perceive the world as you enter it. In the case of innovation, for example, as Paul Virilio wrote so eloquently, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.

When you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technological progress. Adults can understand this easily, and the truth is far too many of the founders and innovators of the last age have been careless, an attitude best summarized by the ethos on Facebook office posters, move fast and break things. I know it's a software term, but I still think it reflects a deep-seated childishness.

Children like to break things. I would often say to anyone who would listen when I visited Facebook, they thought they were so clever doing so, I would have preferred move fast and change things or move fast and fix things.

Core values matter. Don't be evil or stronger relationships with those who love, that's Google and actually Facebook, turned out to be empty sentiments to the new robber barons. I watched as extremely smart, extremely powerful people made a choice. They chose a world where tech companies retain their tax breaks even as women lost bodily autonomy.

They chose a world where immigrants who benefited from the American dream, and many of them are, would allow the door to opportunity to be shut right behind them. They chose a world where monopolies could remain together while gay marriages could go at any moment.

Today, that damage is felt around the globe. For example, in December of 2021, a class action complaint was lodged with the Northern District of San Francisco claiming Facebook, and it's just the biggest, it's why I mentioned them, was willing to trade in the lives of the Rohingya people

for better market penetration in a small country in Southeast Asia. In August of 2016, investigative journalist Maria Ressa gave Facebook alarming data about people, predominantly women and journalists in the Philippines, who are being targeted for graphic online abuse after criticizing President Duterte's drug war. Facebook did not take down the pages for two years after her report.

In 2017, actually, Maria contacted me and asked if I could help convince Facebook of the burgeoning threat. We're a canary in the coal mine and it's coming to you, said the woman who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to shed the light on the murderous reality in her country spurred by online antics of Duterte. Can you help me stop them?

I could not, as it turned out. Power had become far too concentrated in this group of overbred poodles who coveted a frictionless world that allowed them to go from private plane to armored car to the home office on an island. Money did its usual job of corruption. These tech moguls were rarely disagreed with. I used to say they got licked up and down all day, and that was the problem with so many valid questions that were raised that were interpreted as attacks.

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Over time, I agree with the theory that tech people fall into two different visions of the future. First, there's the Star Wars view, which pits the forces of good against the dark side. As we know, the dark side puts up a really good fight. Heroes die, and yes, the Death Star gets destroyed.

But it gets rebuilt again, again and again. Evil, in fact, does tend to prevail. Then there's the Star Trek view, where the Starship crew work together to travel to distant worlds, like an Interstellar Benetton commercial, promoting tolerance and convincing villains not to be villains. I am, no surprise, a Trekkie.

And I'm not alone. At the 2007 All Things Deconference, when I was interviewing Steve Jobs, he appeared on stage in an interview and stated, "I like Star Trek. I want Star Trek." Now Jobs is dead, and the Star Wars version seems to have won. Even if it was never the intention, tech companies became key players in killing our politics, our comedy, our government, and most of all, our minds by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior.

innocuous boy kings -- and may I say, I'm sorry to say, I have three sons and a daughter -- they're all boys -- who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader. It feels like science fiction.

And this is where you come in, because I'm a fucking bummer, I get that. Because for all the intents and purposes, what's going to happen next will be up to the choices you make going forward. When it comes to the continuing tech tsunami that has blown down so much already, people like me hardly matter, because we are not the ones who will endure the weight of what is coming, and we are not the ones who will be impacted the most. And where we are with generative AI, which is now popularly known as chat GPT, though there's tons of them from all the companies, the big companies,

It's in the same place I was in decades ago, and it is up to you to understand how you can take much better control than we did of what will be invented. Along with climate change, this is an existential challenge of the future as both the physical and digital threatens our lives.

To stop this from happening, you must start to understand deeply that you can control this, that it is not out of your hands, even if you think you cannot. I have four children, and two of them who are your age often tell me about how dispiriting the world can seem sometimes, coming at them 24/7 in vast floods of information, both silly and dead serious, with problems that seem insurmountable and rancor that seems unsolvable.

As a parent and also as an observer of our radically reshaped information environment, it's hard to deny their gnawing worries about where this is all headed as we move inexorably to a world more digitized and surveilled and where data is power. But as Allen Ginsberg said so eloquently also, it isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now. What is enough is that you act anyway, even if your heart is broken.

Because here's another mind-blowing concept you must understand. When I first started covering the digital sector, someone asked me what exactly the internet was and where it was going. I was pretty stymied for a second, and then I said simply, "It's everything, and it's going to be everywhere." How would you describe the physical world? It's much the same. What is it? Trees, cars, roads, houses, air, this hall, people? Everything and everywhere.

And what would you do with this fast campus promise like that? Because it is promising. But we took it and made division and no rules and screaming and reductiveness and anger and time wasting and insurrection and Tucker Carlson. Yes, the good stuff. Cat videos are good, though. Let me be clear. It's completely good. And so is ASMR on TikTok. I have to say, try it out. And now with increasing powerful technologies that have capabilities far beyond what has come, what will you make?

Will you use it to discover new drugs that will solve cancer in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the price? Will you use it to put substantive health information and deeper education at the hands of those who have long been denied it?

Will you use it to bring voters together on what they agree on rather than what they do not and get the noisy, noisy people in our political life out of our hair? Will you use it to disperse power to more people rather than less? Will you use it to come up with new ways to solve the climate crisis? This is all possible with this technology. Most of all, will you realize that all this information that is now digitized is really actually us?

All of us, a database of human intentions, and it is rightfully ours to own and use to better humanity rather than cheapen and deaden it. Will you use it to warm our house rather than burn it down? You have to. As George Sand said, it is high time we had lights that are not incendiary torches.

Back to the question of whether AI will kill us, the only thing I can answer now is that I am not afraid of AI. I'm afraid of bad people who use it better than good people. And that's how it's going to go. In this case, it requires all of you to think much more carefully about what you make. You have to think about this.

And about all the implications of that, it's hard to imagine all the times like that because all systems, everything you touched is linked in a vast web. You must take responsibility that the first pioneers of the digital age just did not. I often, when I speak to groups of young people and they ask me what should we do, how should we make things, I said imagine your invention is an episode of Black Mirror and then don't make it. Unless it's the one about the lesbians, which was fantastic.

Santa Junipero, that's what it was. Watch it, it's so good. Just like episode three of "The Last of Us." Anyway, I've recently begun, you see a theme here, it's all gay people.

I have recently begun gardening because that is what a person who decided to have more children at an advanced age does. I need quiet really badly. And it's also because it is a perfect encapsulation of both the digital and physical worlds where you can see in ways that are sometimes hard to in real time. Gardens are quite digital in a lot of ways if you think about them. In the poem, A Gathered Distance, Mark Trednick articulates this so well.

And it is just the kind of advice that will serve you well as you leave to the next thing and then the next thing after that. Life is a series of the next thing. And you'll do well to be ready. He wrote, how a garden hangs together, this one, an instance like the rest of us, of all of us, is how one might cohere and carry on. A garden is never finished, nor are you. Become, I think, a garden again, and never like a garden cease. Find it every bed and nest,

and step out along each pathway and read in every leaf more elliptical renderings daily of the oracle of your life, how to live it as you would fathom it by owing what is worthy of your love and make a garden of every sorrow you will never outgrow, plant every single thing you never really understood and watch it become a tree and stand under it and know why.

And thus, I say with great hope, I know I'm a bummer, I leave you to your own devices, and I mean devices, like my longtime best friend, my iPhone, and also my AirPods and my AirPod Max and my Apple Watch and my iPad. Obviously, don't be me. Please indulge me and take one gentle suggestion as someone who knows more about these devices and what they can do than probably anyone here, that you put them down more often and, of course, look up. So...

I actually wander behind people in San Francisco when they're looking at their phones and I yell, put it down. And they are sorry they're watching it and they do. They don't, at some point I'll be dead, but nonetheless, it's working so far. So put it down. This Hobbit wishes you great good luck, class of 2023. One last thing, you can definitely stop doing your homework.

Today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Blakeney Schick, Christian Castro-Rossell, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to the Cooper Union graduating seniors and its entire staff, including its president, Laura Sparks. And thanks also for my cool graduation hat and fancy honorary degree. It is completely undeserved, really. I would say I hate school, but school kind of hated me.

Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get an intellectual hobbit hat. If not, you have to wear hard pants for the rest of your life. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.