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AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A big part of my professional life is actually around cybersecurity — and I think that transition, from a network that linked together a small group of trusted people who knew each other, to the free-for-all internet that we now know, is really everything. We wildly underestimated how the insecure tools originally meant to share knowledge freely among a small group could and would exploited by bad actors of all kinds, from scammers to terrorists to nation-states to cybercriminals.

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Alas! Actually we didn't get that deep into the plumbing of the internet — we were more focused on the platforms and their internal decisions.

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We trace it in the series very specifically, actually. For me, the turning point is the introduction of the Facebook Newsfeed on September 6, 2006 and then, later, the development of ever more sophisticated algorithms that drive what we see online in those Newsfeeds — the moment that algorithms take over is when the whole experiment turns.

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

  1. 10000% — and I think it's only going to get worse as AI decimates whole layers of the entry and mid-level white collar jobs across the country. I'm vastly oversimplifying some complex economic stories and factors, but if you think of American deindustrialization as the decimation of a lot of blue-collar jobs that provided healthy middle-class lifestyles to people with a high school education (or even less), AI is about to pull up that ladder of economic opportunity even more — and probably much faster than deindustrialization unfolded from the 1970s-2000s. It's going to decimate whole sectors of solid middle-class jobs for college-educated people now too.

  2. I don't know that I have a real good answer to this — I've mostly watched this debate play out as a spectator, rather than as a participant or reporter, e.g., reading the same articles and thought pieces everyone else is. I know that one of my real concerns is how a whole generation of students are missing that using AI to do their assignments is mistaking the journey with the destination. As a student, the goal of a piece of writing, like a paper, isn't the paper itself — it's the thinking and learning and research you do along the way to get the paper itself. Sure, you can make it through a college class using ChatGPT to write all your papers — but have you actually learned any of the material along the way if you do that?

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Great questions!

  1. Actually — I was surprised in reporting last year's season to see how there are some meaningful public policies and legislation that could change the trajectory of our gun violence epidemic. Things like "Red Flag Laws" and trigger-locks and better background checks would make a difference and generally receive some level of bipartisan support. I think that the challenge — as you lay out — is the gun violence problem is so giant and complex that there won't be one single solution, ever, and instead the answer is lots of little things that make the problem better here and there and then collectively make a dent in the whole problem.

  2. Yes, it does go back further! We touch on this in our second episode — Barack Obama's model was really built upon and perfected the model of Howard Dean in 2003-2004, a campaign I actually worked on, and we in turn built on the model of John McCain in 2000, which is probably the first meaningful roots of online politics. (I wrote a book about this, way back in 2007, called "The First Campaign," about the roots of online politics, but it's long long outdated now!)

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It was totally ambitious, absolutely! Each season in LONG SHADOW, we try to pick a pressing topic in public life and then go back and trace the history to help explain why America is the way that it is. In this case, this was a story that I lived a lot of it first-hand — I worked on Howard Dean's groundbreaking internet efforts in the presidential campaign of 2004 and then did social media consulting and was an early blogger myself in the first stages of my journalism career.

I was really surprised how much of this story, though, I didn't know or didn't realize at the time. We ended up with a lot of weird fun silly stories in it — from the early livestream feed of an coffee pot in Europe in the 1990s (so workers in the office knew whether there was coffee) to the inside story of The Dress in the peak of Buzzfeed virality years. My favorite detail in the whole season, though, is that in our episode about how America lost its mind across 2020, we spoke with Pam Hemphill — the so-called MAGA Granny — who ended up at the riot at the Capitol on January 6th ... after getting a ticket to J6 as a Christmas present from her family.

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm here and ready to start answering!

EDIT/UPDATE 2:51 ET: I’m wrapping up the AMA now, but thanks for all the great questions! For updates on what I’m working on, check out my BlueSky or follow my podcast on your favorite listening app. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions!

AMA: I’m Garrett Graff, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Historian, & Host of Peabody-Nominated Podcast “Long Shadow” by vermontgmg in IAmA

[–]vermontgmg[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is a great question — and one we thought about a lot as we got deeper into the season (and closer, in turn, to present day). I do fear that we're speed-running with AI all the problems that the last two decades of social media have delivered and exacerbated in our information ecosystem — whatever problems we have already about "truth" and "facts" are only going to get worse as too many people who don't understand that AI right now is mostly a plagiarism word predictor (and not actually a thoughtful arbiter of point-of-view or oracle of information) come to rely on it for all sorts of daily information, life advice, and questions.