The New York Times: The Rabbit Hole

What is the internet doing to us? The Times tech columnist Kevin Roose discovers what happens when our lives move online.

There are countless stories happening around us everyday. It's easy to overlook the knowledge that can be gained from all kinds of people, and how technology impacts their life.

The Rabbit Hole is a podcast hosted by Kevin Roose, he closely explores the relationship that certain individuals have had with the rapidly evolving online services such as YouTube. It is a relatively short series that I highly recommend, not only do you learn the guest's story, but also some background on the technology that influenced them as well.

Caleb Cain and The Rabbit Hole

Caleb and Kevin Roose discussing the topic further on a news show, found at: https://youtu.be/1IpwddS8RDY

Caleb Cain starts by describing himself as an ordinary guy. In high school he was kind of shy and enjoyed playing video games of all kinds from Legend of Zelda to Call of Duty.

After dropping out of college he was said he felt depressed with little direction; he turns to self-help videos on YouTube and starts following libertarian broadcaster Stefan Molyneux. He now describes Molyneux's content as way of inducting people into libertarian ideologies and eventually becomes a propaganda outlet for right-wing beliefs. YouTube begins to recommend more and more of his videos, and Caleb finds himself watching other controversial figures such as Joe Rogan and Lauren Southern for six to seven hours a day.

Caleb's describes his experiences and how he rationalized his ideas through the concept of the red pill, a metaphor for dealing with the uncomfortable truths that no one wants to talk about, such as race realism, a belief that the differences between races are genetic.

"It's a hidden knowledge, that's exactly what it feels like. It feels like you're going into this deep cave to discover hidden knowledge, except at the bottom of the cave is Nazi gold, not some universal truth. What's at the bottom of the rabbit hole is literally Nazi ideology, but it's not packaged that way." —Cain

Eventually in a YouTube binge, Caleb finds creators on the opposite side of the political spectrum and after bouncing back and forth between creators he realizes that he had been wrong and fortunately finds his way out of the rabbit hole. Caleb now talks about his own experiences as a warning of the dangers of targeted content and content bubbles that something as simple as the YouTube algorithm could have on a ordinary man. YouTube has since taken initiatives to deplatform white nationalists and right extremists, a step in the right direction but clearly there is still issues that need to be resolved.

Guillaume Chaslot and Filter Bubbles

Chaslot is one of many guests on featured on Netflix's The Social Dilemma, more info at https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/

Guillaume Chaslot is a French software engineer and most famously an ex-Google employee. He is an activist for humane technology and is a guest in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, a documentary featuring some of the biggest names behind the technology that have caused the dramatic cultural shift in the 21st century.

Chaslot was introduced in Caleb's story as a party responsible for the overexposure of particular content. He was hired by Google around 2010, at the time he called it his dream job. His first project at Google was to create a new algorithm for YouTube recommendations to replace the previously implemented algorithm that heavily weighed videos quality by clicks generated. The algorithm shifted importance from clicks to total watch time and it caused a explosive increase in consumption by almost 50%. It’s not so much if you’re watching YouTube, it’s how much.

Eventually Chaslot recognized a problem in the algorithm, that maximizing watch time in this way was starting to create these filter bubbles.

"The way I explained it when I was at YouTube at the time was when you watch a cat video then the recommendation engine can say, oh, you watched a cat video so we’re going to give you another cat video, and then another cat video. And then another cat video — more of the same, more of the same, more of the same." —Chaslot

Guillaume realizes that this filter bubble problem he’s been noticing, it’s actually worse than everyone just watching the same cat videos over and over. He sees political conflicts being covered in videos, and is able to see that the differing groups are only being shown their own videos over and over again. Chaslot proposes a project to fix the issue, when he is told to not work on it too much he is promptly fired from Google anyway for a bad performance review.

Chaslot leaves the United States and eventually founds his own company, but he continues to be a spokesperson and an advisor in the technology space, with expertise in AI and data science.

Felix Kjellberg, The Accidental Emperor

Youtube star Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie

Felix Kjellberg is huge YouTube creator who started his career in 2010. At the time he was only a 20 year old undergrad student at a Swedish university, when he decided to upload videos to YouTube under the name PewDiePie. He had huge success on YouTube, becoming the number one most subcribed person on YouTube. He was able to gather massive audiences thanks to his raunchy sense of humor, unfiltered rants, lots of swearing, and reacting to popular horror games, an entire industry of its own. This ends up being a very lucrative venture for PewDiePie, even going as far to striking deals with YouTube and Disney. In 2016, he was reportedly making 15$ million dollars a year while he had around 50 million subscribers.

Years later, PewDiePie openly starts criticizing YouTube's platform when changes to the service begin to affect the way it suggests videos to viewers; he claims that YouTube is actively killing his channel because he is white and people begin to label him racist and a Neo-Nazi. PewDiePie denies the claims but because of his edgy sense of humor he jokingly leans into it and begins to draw media attention. As result of the negative press, his partners begin to cut ties with him and his career starts going into freefall.

A couple of young asian men holding up a sign as request by PewDiePie through the website Fiverr

In the aftermath of the events, he begins to also criticize main stream media, claiming that they are afraid of internet personalities. He explains that in his own circles he knew that the things he did would be taken out of context, and he had only done them in the first place to prove a point; His criticisms were validated when other internet personalities came out to defend him and condemn newspaper journalists for not doing real research and this really starts a deeper conversation about the fight between internet culture and mainstream institutions.

Roose was able to sit down with PewDiePie and talk about the incidents, and he seemed to genuinely express regret from the misunderstandings and feels responsible for things done using his name; he reminds us that he is actually not passionate about politics in any way, saying that it was frustrating for him to be associated with alt-right groups. This meeting with a representative of The New York Times was one of the first with a news organization since he began to openly disapprove them. He described his relationship with the media and what his intentions were moving forward.

"I mean, obviously, he doesn’t need me to get a message out to the public. He has millions more subscribers than The New York Times. But by talking to me when he did, it almost felt like he was proposing a truce. He was saying that like, “That era of my career is over, and I’m going to change.” —Roose

PewDiePie celebrated his 10 year anniversary on YouTube with now over 100 million subscribers by playing Minecraft on his channel.

Conlusions

The stories told The Rabbit Hole are engaging because they are about people who were just once ordinary people, who's lives have been forever changed because of the modern internet landscape. In other episodes, Kevin Roose researches the rise of exploding cultural influencers, like TikTok stars, as well as conspiracies such as those found in QAnon groups. I shared some of my favorites here but I recommend listening to the whole podcast and the other resources related to them that I have linked in the blog.