The Great Barrington Declaration and how polarized we are
🥂 Happy Friday, y’all
Issue #223: legislating social media + “the ceiling of your inputs”
Last week, Trump picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. federal agency responsible for public health research.
Dr. Bhattacharya is best known for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter to the U.S. government arguing against Covid lockdowns. (It was drafted in Great Barrington, MA, hence the name.) Alongside two epidemiology professors, he advocated to let healthy adults freely contract the virus in the name of reaching herd immunity.
The Declaration was endlessly politicized, and still is. Dr. Fauci called it “nonsense.” Facebook allegedly removed it for a week. Twitter shadow-banned Bhattacharya.
Personally, I understand why public health officials went HAM to “hold the line” in 2020, and why Trust and Safety employees at Twitter may have been quick to push the shadow ban button. 2020 and 2021 were scary, uncertain years. And yet, the pushback GBD got feels overblown to me. I’m curious how it feels to you.
Scientists now agree we may never reach herd immunity as it was envisioned in 2020 (and in the Declaration) because Covid evolves so quickly. On Medium, epidemiologist Gideon M-K notes that Sweden implemented some of the GBD’s recommendations and did not achieve herd immunity. (Sweden’s curve swung up and down just like the rest of the world’s, in the long run.) Most of what I’ve read points to the fact that the GBD was misinformed. But we were all misinformed in 2020, to some degree. We were all trying to figure it out, and there wasn’t a “right” path forward — only a path that would reduce some risks at the expense of others.
When Dr. Bhattacharya was nominated, Bulletproof Coffee inventor Dave Asprey called the Declaration an attempt to “stand up to evil.” That feels extreme — and emblematic of how polarized we’ve become. Why do we need to frame this in terms of good v. evil? How is that helpful, ever? What I see is a philosophical disagreement over how to weigh pros and cons, which is hard in a situation where some of the first-order risks are clear (lives lost) but the second- and third-order risks are less clear (schools closed for 18 months).
☁️ One more story: the future of social media
Entrepreneur and media vet John Battelle adds context to a post by Emily Liu, Bluesky’s head of comms. Liu explains how Bluesky’s project is bigger than building just one social network. They’re building an open protocol, similar to email or the web itself. Anyone can spin up an app on this protocol, and users can keep their identity and followers/networks when they flee Bluesky in a decade (or tomorrow) for the next app of their choice. It’s intentionally “billionaire-proof.”
Battelle thinks that’s great (so do I), but adds historical context from the cell phone industry. Until around 2004, it was impossible to switch carriers and keep your number. The only reason I could switch from Verizon to AT&T last year and still get texts from old friends? Legislation. Maybe, Battelle argues, now is the time to pass one elegant piece of legislation (the ACCESS Act, anyone?) that would enshrine our right to data portability.
♻️ Practical wisdom
“The quality of your outputs can only ever reach the ceiling of your inputs.” (Jasmine Sun)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Gillis
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