Washington, D.C. — Following Apple’s release of its iPhone X early this week and buzz around the direction of technology companies, Thinking CAP podcast co-hosts Michele Jawando and Igor Volsky sat down with futurist comedian Baratunde Thurston to have a frank conversation about social media. Thurston is a pioneer in digital content development and an alumnus of “The Daily Show” and “The Onion.” He is the author of The New York Times best-seller How to Be Black. On the podcast, released this morning, he delivers a scathing critique and dire warning about the growing trends of social media.
“The incentives [of our technological environments] were not to draw people together or engage in meaningful exchange, they were to sell each and every one of us, cut almost literally in a thousand different slices, to advertisers. So they can sell us crap we don’t want, at prices we cannot afford, on credit we should not have ever been extended,” Thurston says on the podcast episode. “It’s not just ‘Twitter is bad’, or ‘Facebook brings out the worst in us,’ their bringing out the worst in us is their business model, and it’s profitable and it’s driven by a funding model of venture capital and 10x return rate, that says that the only way we can support this is if we sell people into a very beautifully bullshitted story that is a light version of slavery.”
The interview with Baratunde Thurston kicks of a series of comedic interviews lined up from the podcast this fall, hoping to lighten the mood after months of resistance, civic activism, policy upheaval, and frequent Friday night news drops out of the Trump White House. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, and CAP’s website.
For more information or for information on guest booking, please contact Sally Tucker at 202.481.8103 or [email protected].