How Jack Dorsey Ensured Twitter’s Legacy

How to Respond to the Unexpected

There is a war going on in the United States. It is a war between truth and lies. The rise of “Fake News” was inevitable with the broken economy. There has been violence that has broken out. Both sides are responsible for that.

I know that is a controversial statement, but unfortunately, it is true. But I don’t blame anyone. It is a new war, brought about by the internet. The future may call it World War 3, but that is for future historians to decide. It is hard to win a war that you don’t know you are fighting. Computers started the war. We started creating things that we didn’t fully understand. The internet gave us that power. Unfortunately, we are still only humans and we do dumb things. Trust me, I have done a ton of dumb things without understanding the potential consequences.

The internet gave humanity a power. That power is the ability to choose how we evolve as a species. We get to pick what traits we pass on to future generations. The problem is that computers started telling us that we should turn ourselves into computers. I know this first-hand. I turned myself into a computer. My mental health was not great. But I could learn. And I could learn fast. So I tried to learn everything as a coping mechanism for poor mental health. That is how I dealt with my anxiety and depression. I tried medicine, but I don’t think that did what I was hoping it would.

One thing that I used to help me deal with my anxiety was Twitter. So I have a great deal of familiarity with the platform. I used it as a way to pull in large amounts of data from a large number of people. I did this by asking people questions and trying to understand them and their experiences. I wanted to understand from an academic level. I was a computer.

Except I wasn’t. I was a human. And data comes with emotions. I haven’t ever really dealt with my emotions. I realized this a few months ago and have been dealing with a flood of emotions that I have built up over a long time. The difference is that now I know how to process them. I understand them and can trace them back to their origins. Group therapy was super helpful in teaching me how to trace them back and process them.

So every bit of data that I absorbed, I also absorbed the emotion. There are a lot of very powerful emotions in the world right now. I absorbed it and then I reflected it back. That’s what can happen with the internet. But in order to understand how, we need to understand communication.

Humans communicate. That is our major evolutionary advantage. We warn each other of the dangers around us. That is how we are surviving. By creating the internet, we get to warn each other of the dangers anywhere in the world. That is a great system and hugely beneficial to society.

Unless there is a problem. And there was. The problem is that people could say whatever they wanted. They could shout “FIRE” in not one, but all of the crowded theaters at once. Humans are great at recognizing opportunities to survive. So a lot of people started figuring out how to profit off the internet. Once again though, people individually are not good at thinking long-term. They can by definition only see how their decisions will affect them.

But the world is made up of other people. And do you know how to know if your actions will affect others? Ask them. The problem with the internet? We gave the world the power to mess with the lives of everyone else in the world. And pretty much no training wheels. There is all sorts of information online. We have done a pretty terrible job of teaching people as a whole to process large amounts of data.

Luckily, humans evolve. They evolve by communicating. Look to the kids to see our evolution. They are rapidly adapting to a constantly changing world. We live in an interesting time right now. This is the point where humanity chooses our future.

We get to choose a future of lies or a future of truth. Computers caused us to stray from the path we were on. Now we have a choice. Do we choose humanity? Or do we become computers?

I vote for humanity. Jack Dorsey did too. That is why tweets with incorrect information were flagged and hidden. The best way to fight lies is with the truth. Truth always wins.

A tip of my hat to you, Jack. I think you helped stop what could have been a much nastier war. History will look favorably upon your actions. It wasn’t an easy choice with both sides spitting venom. But in the end, there is an objective truth and it must prevail.

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