Member-only story
How to Fix Twitter, and the World
Dear Elon,
Congratulations on your purchase of Twitter.
I believe in your good intention to have significant positive impact in our world.
I have this simple idea for profound change in the social media sphere that I wanted to share with you.
As a background to this article the concept of the “Digital Twin” from the documentary The Social Dilemma; A model of what we look at and respond to is built up by, in this case, the Twitter algorithm, and it ends up knowing us better than we do ourselves, in terms of what will hook our attention.
The problem is that what hooks our attention is, more often than not, driven by the kind of worst version of ourselves, the part that responds to something that fires up our emotional centres. And as a result we end up getting more and more of that, creating a feedback loop bubble that moves us ever towards our worst selves.
What I would like is for my feed to be a positive feedback loop — let me train it to give me the kinds of scientific journals and uplifting news that I want the best version of myself to be most focused on.
Then using Twitter becomes a way to improve myself, rather than bringing out the worst in me.
