Monday Medley
Tomorrow's panel, last week's roundtable, and quick links
Be Careful What You Tweet, They May Make You Join a Panel
Back in November, I launched what might be my most popular tweet ever:
This kicked off a discussion with several folks, including Meta’s Kaitlin Sullivan, who know a lot more than I do about platform content moderation transparency reports. I learned a lot! Shoshana Weissmann at R Street decided others should have that chance, and so we are re-hashing the debate in a virtual event. That event, which will be keyoted by Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) is tomorrow, January 24, 2023 - RSVP here.
I’ll be advocating for bottom-up, norm-building, emergent order solutions to content moderation disclosures. Join us if you can!
Dynamic Competition and Emergent Order
Last week the Dynamic Competition Initiative hosted a roundtable on my book. After my (somewhat rusty) presentation of some key themes from the book, two discussants, Peter Klein of Baylor University and Asta Pundziene of UC Berkeley Haas, gave responses. Once the recording stopped, we had a free-flowing discussion among all attendees. A few highlights you might find valuable:
We spent a lot of time discussing when emergent order doesn’t work and what to do then. This is, admittedly, one of the thinner parts of my book. My book focuses on demonstrating that emergent order does exist, is ubiquitous, and quite powerful. I don’t spend much time digging in to what to do when it goes wrong. (Timothy B. Lee’s twitter-thread review on this point is still ringing in my ears.)
Peter’s new book, Why Managers Matter, seeks to grapple with this exact problem in the managerial context - it sounds great.
Asta dug in to the different roles that emergent order can play in innovation. There are the somewhat infrequent breakthrough innovations that establish an entirely new space, and there are the incremental innovations over time within an established space.
David Teece highlighted that business leaders seek “control through rules” or “control through culture.” We had some great discussion as to the extent to which different kinds of “control” are really more what I call in my book “influence.”
Thibault Schrepel, leaning in to the latter half of my book, wondered whether one way to test if our habits are at a local maxima might be to just pick something random to remove from our lives - a tool or habit - and see what happens without it. I thought that was a intriguing idea. Sort of a roll-the-dice Marie Kondo approach.
Natalia Moreno Belloso prepared for the session a five-page summary of my book - it’s terrific!
Quick Hits and Interesting Links
Last week, Americans for Prosperity signed on to an excellent amicus brief by Center for Growth and Opportunity in the Gonzalez v. Google case. This is the first case in which SCOTUS could interpret the text of Section 230, a 1996 law that fosters free speech online. TL;DR: the plain text of the statute means Google isn’t responsible for content posted by others on YouTube. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
Stand Together interviews Entrepreneur magazine editor-in-chief Jason Feifer on his new book, Build For Tomorrow.
Mark Febrizio at GW’s Regulatory Studies Center argues that ChatGPT won’t really break the notice and comment process for regulatory agencies.