When Jack Dorsey co-founded
Twitter in 2006, he had no idea he and his colleagues were creating what would become a universally accessible, global, seamless, 24/7 platform for tens of thousands of people to yell at him. In any case, back then, billionaire tech execs were still — at least in some circles — figures of admiration, rather than a locus of fear and suspicion for many on the left and right alike.
Social media has succeeded all too well in its disruptive mission, reshaping societies in ways they’re still struggling to understand. That leaves the likes of Dorsey, who’s been the CEO of Twitter since 2015 (after an abortive initial run from 2006 to 2008), grappling, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, with an ever-growing slate of issues of daunting complexity.
In two interview sessions — one over dinner (fried chicken, oysters; the day’s only meal on his intermittent fasting regimen) at New York’s Blue Ribbon Brasserie, where he brought his own bottle of organic, low-alcohol wine; the other in a glass-doored conference room in Twitter’s bustling San Francisco headquarters — Dorsey addressed those challenges, and talked about his life, work, career and ideas. The night of the first conversation, he was headed for the airport to kick off a three-week trip to India and Myanmar. His decision to spend time at a grueling silent-meditation retreat in the latter country — where the military is
perpetrating atrocities against minority Rohingya Muslims — sparked a significant backlash. Addressing that subject in our second meeting was the only time an ounce of irritation broke through his otherwise formidably tranquil demeanor.
He is, especially judged against certain Silicon Valley stereotypes, highly personable; he makes (sometimes very intense) eye contact, laughs easily, has excellent manners. Dorsey, 42, is a serious music fan (the Twitter masses were unimpressed when he designated Kendrick Lamar his “favorite poet”), who is at his core a digital aesthete, à la Steve Jobs. He even followed Jobs’ exile-and-return career path. After Dorsey was cast out of Twitter in 2008, he co-founded Square, the now-multibillion-dollar mobile-payment company (it’s the reason you can use a credit card at your local food cart) — and his old company eventually pulled him back in. He’s now CEO of both.
In San Francisco, he wore black jeans, running sandals that facilitate his daily five-mile walk to work, and a hooded cashmere sweater that he notes is more than three years old. His nose ring and voluminous facial hair — which prompted a Republican congressman to inform him last year that he doesn’t look like a CEO — make more sense in light of his peripatetic pre-Twitter life, in which he trained as a massage therapist, studied botanical illustration and considered a career in fashion design. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversations. (...)
The model in Silicon Valley for a long time was “we are a neutral platform.” It’s obviously not quite the case anymore. So if it’s not a platform, what is it?
People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square. Washington Square Park, for instance — I just had an hour and a half there, today. I sat, and I did my phone calls, and I watched people. There’s a lot going on in Washington Square Park. There’s tourists, students, filmmakers, musicians, street hustlers, weed dealers, chess players. And there’s people talking out in the open. The park itself is completely neutral to whatever happens on top of it. But if you stop there, you don’t realize what I believe the park actually is. It does come with certain expectations of freedom of expression, but everyone is watching one another. So if someone gets up on a little soapbox, with a megaphone, and starts yelling, a crowd comes around them and listens. That person can also yell across the park and say, “Hey, you idiot, yeah, you, I’m talking to you, come over here.” Then it’s really harassing behavior and people notice that, and they’re like, “Hey, man, don’t do that. Stop.” And then there’s the park police as well, who maintain the standard of decency within the park.
Dealing with harassment seems easy compared with grappling with the idea of false information. Sometimes it seems like your approach is “If there’s false information, the nature of Twitter is such that we count on the real information to overcome it.” Is that correct?
Well, I think it happens, but it’s not something that we should make a model. It can unfold that way, but that doesn’t mean we can rely upon it. An example, there was this tweet, before the [2016] elections. Someone tweeted out an image of a code that supposedly allowed you to register to vote. It was misinformation. So the way that this plays out on Twitter is that the tweets calling it out as false got more impressions than the original. More people saw the tweets calling it out as false than saw the original tweet.
What do you conclude from that?
We could just sit back and be neutral and passive, like, “OK, we’re good,” because the thing self-corrects. But instead we should learn what that means and how we can make more of those things happen. We can’t be arbiters of truth. I think that would be dangerous for anyone to want us to be. So what can we do? What we’re deciding to do is [focus on] misleading information, which intends to lead someone in a particular direction, intends them to take a particular action. The voter-suppression tweet was certainly misinformation, but more dangerously it was misleading people to take an action that would harm society and maybe themselves. I don’t think we should just say, “The network takes care of itself.” We need to say, “How do we not determine true or false, but how do we determine is it misleading?” Then, how do we stop the dissemination of misleading information before it reaches significant exposure? (...)
Do you yourself have any degree of Twitter addiction? Do you compulsively check Twitter the way many of the rest of us do?
In context, I do. During events, I do. During election night it was nonstop, during a basketball game it’s nonstop. That’s when I have the recent-tweets feature on; all the other time I have the most-relevant tweets on. I know this is gonna sound way out there, because we’re nowhere near what I’m about to say, but when I close the app, I want to have learned something new. We’re just so far off. If I asked anyone in this restaurant, “After closing Twitter, did you learn anything?” Most of them are gonna say no, or they learned something they already knew. Ultimately, I want every single person that uses Twitter to not spend hours, or days, or minutes consuming content, but [instead] to be notified when there’s something that potentially they could learn from, and, to the highest degree, that they’d want to participate in a conversation around it. That, to me, would contribute to the health aspect. Like, I’d walk away from Twitter feeling empowered, I’d feel more informed, I’d feel happy. Right now, I just feel overwhelmed, because I don’t think I’m learning anything new, ultimately.
There’s obviously been an overall shift from a techno-optimism to a techno-pessimism. What’s your case for Twitter, in particular, as an overall force for good?
I think it’s a net positive that everyone has more potential to have a voice. Because it benefits those who traditionally didn’t the most. The thing I’m most proud of Twitter for is that it has been a vehicle for historically marginalized groups to share their story. (...)
How are you not in a constant state of agitation that something terrible is going to trend, or that a war or some other calamity is going to start over a tweet?
We have a global team. And I trust them to make decisions. And I trust them to make decisions without me having to interject or oversee them at all. And I trust that we have a learning mindset. That we’re gonna do retros on what we fucked up. And we’re going to learn from that. And we’re not going to repeat the same mistakes. So in terms of what happens in the platform, I am concerned. I am a citizen in this world. I feel the weight of how our tool is used in society and how it’s been used for good and how it’s used for stuff I’m not proud of.
For instance?
Like creating bubbles and echo chambers. I’m not proud of that. Like, we definitely help divide people. We definitely create isolation. We definitely make it easy for people to confirm their own bias. We’ve only given them one tool, which is follow an account that will 90 percent confirm whatever bias you have. And it doesn’t allow them to seek other perspectives. It contributes to tribalism. It contributes to nationalism. And it’s counter to what we need the world to consider, which is, how do we solve climate change? There’s no country anywhere on the planet that’s gonna solve it alone. How do we solve AI taking all of our jobs or nuclear war? These are global conversations, and it’s gotta be pointed in that direction. Right now it’s pointed inward. (...)
Based on the time you spent with him, would you be able to lay out your philosophical differences with someone like Mark Zuckerberg? Twitter and Facebook have approached the world in different ways.
I would love to. I just don’t know what his philosophies are. I don’t know what their purpose is.
Facebook’s purpose?
Mm-hmm. I know what they say, but I don’t know. I see Mark as a very, very smart businessman. He will excel to gain as much market share as possible.
If you were CEO of Facebook instead, would you know what to do with them?
No. I’ve got enough on my plate. I think the intention of a lot of people at the company is right. If the philosophy is helping the world realize that we’re all facing the same problems. We should end this distraction of nationalism. That is a promise of the internet. I would rather us be proactive around solving these problems together than reactive. If that’s the goal and that’s the stated intention, then I would know a few things to do.
What was your most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg?
Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat.
In front of you?
No. He killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife. Then they send it to the butcher.
A . . . laser gun?
I don’t know. A stun gun. They stun it, and then he knifed it. Then they send it to a butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.
It’s hard to find a metaphor in that.
I don’t know what you’re going to do with that, but hopefully that’s not the headline. Revenge is a dish best served warm. Or cold.
Image: Illustration by Jimmy Turrell. Photograph used in illustration by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
