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The race to build a better internet before it’s too late

NBC News Analysis: A new book proposes a framework for the internet that would give consumers more control over their own personal data. One of the worst attributes of our society at times is the search for someone to blame. Sometimes we prioritize figuring out who is at fault rather than focusing on how to fix the problem. Our current politics are dominated by debates over who is to blame for various problems. Take immigration: The debate over whom to blame takes up more time and space than the debate about how to implement the various ideas we actually all kinda-sorta agree on for fixing the issue at the center of the blame game. Even the ideas to mitigate the current immigration problems at the border are tied up in a cycle of paralysis that has been repeated over and over in a number of areas, not just immigration, over the past decade. In fact, about the only thing the country agrees on is that political polarization has stopped us from solving even the smallest problems. But other than agreeing about the existence of our disagreements, we appear incapable of trying to bridge these hardening divides. One idea to fix our polarization is to come up with a better incentive structure for our politicians so that they act more often for the greater good than for their own personal gain. Right now, it’s clearly broken…As a new book argues, Big Tech appears to have perfected a model that has created rhetorical paralysis. Using our own data against us to create dopamine triggers, tech platforms have created “a state of perpetual disagreement across the divide and a concurrent state of perpetual agreement within each side,” authors Frank McCourt and Michael Casey write, adding: “Once this uneasy state of divisive ‘equilibrium’ is established, it creates profit-making opportunities for the platforms to generate revenue from advertisers who prize the sticky highly engaged audiences it generates.”…

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