Ruby Thelot on Internet Culture, AI, and the Future of Taste

Sophia Dew and Sofia Puccini are joined by Ruby Thelot, designer, artist, cyberethnographer, professor at NYU, and founder of 13101401, for a wide-ranging conversation about internet culture, AI, digital communities, and how technology is reshaping the way we relate to one another. Drawing on years of research into online behavior, Ruby explains how digital cultures form, why algorithms shape more than just what we see, and what AI is changing about creativity, communication, and identity. They discuss cyberethnography, online subcultures, "machinic taste," AI companions, social norms, internet language, and why Americans often say they dislike AI—even as they increasingly rely on it in everyday life.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Americans don't like AI. AI is a very broad term. They all use chat and like, I love it. I love, I love chat, but they don't like AI. There's the boogeyman of like, I'm gonna lose my job. But when I talk to mothers in Brian, Texas, like, oh, yeah, like, I had a leak in my, in my faucet, whatever, I took a photo and in about an hour or two, I was able to fix that thing. I love that. There's a bit of a language issue here around what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that's coming in a somewhat near potential future.

• 0:35Erik Torenberg?

  Today's episode comes from our list of recommended listening, where we feature standout conversations from people across our broader network. This one stuck with us for its thoughtful perspective on AI, internet culture, and the ways technology is quietly reshaping how we communicate and relate to one another. MTS hosts Sophia Du and Sophia Puccini are joined by designer, cyberethnographer, and NYU professor Ruby J. Therlau to discuss digital communities, online identity, taste, and what it means to live alongside rapidly evolving technology.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Today, I am joined by my co-host Sophia as well as Ruby Justice Therlau, who is a designer, artist, cyberethnographer, and professor at the Integrated Design and Media at NYU. So he's written about everything from internet folklore to digital memory to AI companions, creativity, and the future of culture. And I think he has one of the most interesting perspectives on what it really means to live alongside this technology. So Ruby, I am so excited to have you on today.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  The question on everyone's mind, what is a cyberethnographer? And also, how has the field evolved through the years?

• 1:46Speaker 00

  So a cyberethnographer is someone who studies groups of people online and how they behave and what they do. So my research ranges from studying furries all the way to now studying how people are using Instagram. I had a recent piece for Protein where I asked people how they, what they understood what, what an Instagram story like meant to them. And so around 500 people, 20 sort of closer interviews to build a lexicon, a glossary of what does this digital interaction mean to people? Is it content appreciation? Is it romantic affiliation? Or is it just, you know, friendship continuation? Which are the three sort of, the three-part type meaning structure that I built for Instagram story likes.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  With the Mozilla Foundation recently, I did research on close friends. Okay, so we have this new thing now called close friends on Instagram. If you're in my close friends, are we acquaintances? Are we like families? And how do we choose who gets to be in these different sort of digital spaces? These are novel behaviors that did not exist two years or three years ago. And we need to build understanding and language around them. And that's a big part of my research.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  What's interesting here is that cyberethnography is not something that's necessarily new. This is not a new field. However, my hunch is that this field has probably been changing a lot in the last few years, or at least in the past decade, with just the progress of technology and the introduction of new types of social media, as new types of online behaviors. Even just Gen Alpha, just a generation underneath, has a whole different interaction with their technology than we do as Gen Z or than millennials above us. And so I'm curious to get your perspective on how this whole space has changed.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  I mean, there's the, there's the goats like Dana Boyd. I mean, she's a big inspiration for my own research. A big part of me trying to understand what close friends meant was looking at her research on MySpace Top 8. When she was, she was at Microsoft for a long time, actually at Cornell as a professor. And she was leading a team at Microsoft Research. And so people have been doing these things for a long time. But of course, the cycles are accelerating. And the features are getting shipped faster and faster. And we have these changes in, you know, I like to say that every novel technology leads to changes in being, communicating, and belief. And the faster these things happen, the less time we have as researchers or academics

• 4:12Speaker 00

  to do the research and do the interviews. But I think it still needs to be done because million if not billions of people are using these tools and these things, features.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So one of my questions was like, basically, how long does it take to identify a new social phenomenon online? And then how many of them are actually perceptible versus imperceptible? Because I think, for example, like, a lot of teachers, if they have young kids and they're teaching like Gen Alpha, they will like, be very confused for a long time about like, what is this new six, seven thing? And, and so they, like, they, there's a whole layer that they are just like, not privy to. So yeah, what do you see?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  So this is one of the hardest things to do on the internet. I like to say, is this a real thing? Or is this three TikToks in a trench coat? Because oftentimes, what feels like a trend, what feels like a novel social behavior can just be super micro, super small. And so what my firm, R2S, what we do at 131 is we do a lot of like quantitative analysis of social media to see how prevalent is this thing really? Six, seven was definitely real. Not only did we see an increase in the mentions of that on social media, we also see the behavior seep through the IRL. And when you're doing interviews with teachers, when I'm traveling the country,

• 5:30Speaker 00

  asking people how they're using technology, I'm also seeing that sort of leap over into the physical world. A good example of this is, there's been a few articles about this thing called heteropessimism. This is the, the sort of aversion that certain straight women have about dating men. And I was like, okay, is this a real thing? So we went, what did we did? We took a look at the top posts about dating on TikTok. Editing over a million views, take a look at 2,000 videos. And then, you know, using the scripts identifying, did heteropessimism grow since 2020 on TikTok reels and across different platforms? And we found that dating content is mostly positive. But our beloved journalists, I think because of their algorithms,

• 6:15Speaker 00

  I think are getting hit with a lot of that content. And then they think it's a trend. But when I take a look at the data, at the top 2,000 videos across five years, I can say that like, it's actually kind of decreased over time. And most dating content is, for the most part, positive, about 40 or 50%.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fascinating. So there is like a sort of loud minority phenomenon happening with content. How many of the trends do you see are like entirely sort of like, the proportion of them is just like wrong, like erroneous?

• 6:46Speaker 00

  And, and it's not only the loud minority, it's also the people who write about them have specific algorithms. You know, they have specific lives that push certain things to them. And so that also has an influence to what gets reported. So I'm a critic, I'm a, I write for magazines. And sometimes I'm looking for a piece and I'm gonna go on social media and I'm gonna try to find something interesting. That does not mean, whether it's a fashion trend, whether it's a behavior like six, seven, that that actually has any prevalence in the rest of America, you know?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So how do you determine that? How do you actually determine what has prevalence? How do you determine what might just be a bias that's on your algorithm or on a different journalist's algorithm?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Well, you do research, but you know, sometimes when you run a writer piece, you don't have time to do full research. So you actually will interview the TikToker, the person who's made that first post. So there still is something happening. But the question to me is always, is this only in Bushwick? Or is this actually happening outside?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so true.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  So what have you observed about where culture starts? Because like, there's, there's been a lot of like, culture theorists that talk about this of how like, you know, they're very contained environments that sort of breach containment. And it's all like very, you know, small subcultures that are honestly pretty weird. Like, for example, the like, insul subculture ended up, you know, trickling out. And like, now everyone uses terms like looks maxing, for example. And there's been a million examples of this sort of thing happening online. You mentioned furries, I feel like this is another one, where it's like a very core group of people. And then like, things just start like coming out of there, like they start emanating out of there.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're definitely in a period of what I would call a pluriculture, right? Where before we had 10, five channels, we all watched the same things. Now, we are in a pluriculture where there's very strong, very generative, very active cultural epicenters that are kind of sometimes touching each other, sometimes far away from each other. That's something that feels as big as like a show like White Lotus or Succession. If you take a look at what the viewership for that is compared to a show like MASH, compared to even the finale for Lost, not that many people have seen it. But if you're on X, it feels like everyone's watching Succession. And yet the numbers kind of, when you compare them to even a show like, more people watch Big Bang, they're watching Session, which kind of sounds crazy when you think about it.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  And so I think what's very important for me, and, and you know, my friend Rui and I worked on this, on this paper called the Balkanization and Babalification of the Internet. So the Balkanization is this Splitting of our monoculture into these small digital enclaves, you know, they've been balkanized. And on our little insular digital islands, what do we do? We have speciation, we develop our own languages, much like the turtles on the Galapagos Islands, right? Our own specific vernacular, our own specific language. And the problem with containment, with being so insular is that when we have something like looks maxing or anything that breaks, well, because now we've been sort of abellified,

• 9:54Speaker 00

  we've developed our own unique idiosyncratic micro languages. We no longer know what things mean when we speak to each other online. You know, we're using the same word, but they have a completely different meaning. If you're in the furry community, if you're in the incel community, if you're in the, you know, high fashion Twitter, whatever it is, and you're using the same word and mean completely different things because you've been in that digital bubble. And that's the kind of that babblification is very dangerous.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And in those digital bubbles too, there's some external incentives to group people into specific individual bubbles because it's easier to market to them. And you know, even on like Spotify, it's like, oh, you are a pink pony princess pop girl. And then everyone's like, oh, like this is the, my culture, these are the people I identify with. And it's almost, people want to feel like they're part of a tribe. And at the same time, companies want us to also feel like a part of the tribe. Are you seeing that just happen more and more and more and more? That there's are just such tiny sub niches of our new culture?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, a big part of my job when I do consulting, you know, anywhere from H and M to Pepsi is to kind of go in these small digital communities and like map them.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  That H and M knows what to sell, you know?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  H and M recently had a dime square shirt last year. And so that is based on research that was done on different digital communities.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  As someone who was in New York for two weeks over a few weeks ago, I'm not sure if you know dime square, it's the new micro neighborhood.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I know.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  But so, so people want to market, right? They want to be able to say, okay, I have this specific group. And it also makes the job of the algorithm easier because the title, the name, the nomenclature makes it more legible to the algorithm.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  How is this now playing into our current modern day world where you don't just have people who are deciding these algorithms, but rather it's artificial intelligence that are deciding these algorithms? Is this accelerating the development of these micro communities, of these labeling's, of almost these decisions that get made by algorithms, not less humans?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  So I have an essay that came out recently called machinic taste for the random art, where I kind of talk about this. So we might've seen the numbers from cloud flare coming out this year, about 50% of internet traffic as they see it as bots. What does this do? So you had a period of time where people were posting to their friends. Then you started posting to their followers and then they start posting an audience. When a creator or a poster develops an audience, what we see is that their content changes. They become captured by their audiences. Meaning when they see that something works, they tend to do more of it. The concept of audience capture, I get from my dear friend Matt Klein, who's the head of insights at Reddit. The thing that's happening now is that not only is their audience captured, but to get

• 12:47Speaker 00

  to your audience, there's also a gatekeeper, which is the algorithm.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  That's why Mr. Beast looks like that on every single video with the big text, right? And even our beloved tech podcasters also kind of do the same kind of Mr. Beast face in order to get views. And so you have audience capture, you have algorithmic capture. And now when your audience is now 50% bot, 50% human, we suddenly see machinic or agentic capture happening too. Because who is responding to your post? We see this on X, it's not just human, it's also bots.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And so there's this waltz, this three-legged waltz between machine, algorithm, and your human audience. And if we predict, as I do, that the number of bots is going to increase, suddenly it may just be that we will only have bots making things, right? We'll only have, you know, AI-generated content, an AI audience. And suddenly what we'll see is what I call machinic taste. We'll actually get to see what are the aesthetic proclivities? What are the aesthetic preferences of an agent-to-agent connection?

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, that is absolutely fascinating to me. Do you think that like agents will have diversified preferences? Or like, do you think that there will be like some sort of convergent, like, you know? Well, agents have subcultures is basically.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Kind of what we're, I guess we're talking about before. If we have a rich LLM ecosystem with a different kind of models and different kind of ways, then I, we can, one can surmise that they'll have their own specific aesthetic preferences.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  That's awesome. So speaking of aesthetics, you wrote a piece about, or you participated in an event about like, why are there no new aesthetics? So I wanted to get your take on this because this is something that I think about all the time. Even people like Tyler Cowen have like created fellowships for like, somebody please make a new aesthetic. So why do you think this is?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  So in the, in the lecture, I think the first thing is that there are many new aesthetics, they're just not mass. And it's very difficult to make a new mass aesthetic because for the most part, mass culture has been subsumed by finance. I give the example of architecture, I give examples in movies, right? If you take a look at the graph of sequels over time, just way more sequels than there were before. But I think we also have as an audience, a responsibility to seek out the things that are novel. And, you know, I say new aesthetics require search, new aesthetics require a novel philosophy as well, right? We need to start to think about what the world is going to be. New aesthetics require a novel vision of the future.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Also that new aesthetics emerge from synthesis, like it's the kid who's making this amazing kind of like Brazilian funk that's like mixed with like Japanese pop right now that's being made on YouTube. And I think it's a kid with three screens. He's like playing Counter-Strike, he's listening, like he's listening to Brazilian funk and like also listening to anime at the same time. And that's how the music sort of like.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  And that's become the new aesthetic.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Brazilian funk anime.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so but it's, it's happening. And like, I think it's not at all like the number one, I played a Ella Langley's Chasing Texas, because I was like, that's the number one song in America.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And so there's a difference between the revealed preference of like, that's the number one song, they'll say we want new things, but are we actually engaging with new things? Are we actually giving that kid a shot? It's very difficult for our current culture industry to do so because all of their decisions have been financialized. They will make a movie if they think that like it's going to place well, do well, they'll pick a person who already has a following on Instagram if they think the song's going to do well. And the last thing that I deplore, and this is like me talking about my own job as a critic, is that critics also are no longer doing their job, right? Because we publish on platforms that are advertising based. And so we can't be as mean and as critical as we used to be or uplift something that

• 16:33Speaker 00

  like very little people are going to care about, right? There's like a, an incentive to, I think, we know the optimism, to be more popular because the platform lives on clicks.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you're almost designing your own human judgment, your own human taste, based off of what these algorithms are probably going to be promoting. I am also curious to get your takes on what taste even means. You write a lot about it. And I think this is a very misunderstood term, even I personally, it's like, okay, everyone's like, oh, taste is the only moat in the AI age and all of these conversations about it. And I was like, okay, personal preference, like having good style. Okay, interesting. Reading your works, you really go through the actual historical meaning behind this and how it's almost connected to morality and all of these other aspects of it. And I think this is a really important information that maybe isn't talked about quite enough. I'm curious to get your perspective here.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  So I wrote a book called A Few Essays on Taste, where the first essay is called A Brief History of Taste. And I make, I make the case that taste is not just aesthetic preference. Taste is a way for people to consume virtuously. The question of taste emerged in the 17th century at a time where people needed guidance as to how to consume properly. So in 1688, the Bill of Rights happens in England after the Glorious Revolution, and the nobility's powers are restrained. And as they lose political power, they also lose cultural power. At the same time, you have the growth of the British colonies.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  You have immense amounts of wealth that are being generated in, in the United Kingdom. And suddenly you have this nouvelle bourgeoisie, you have this sort of new elite that emerges. And there's a. Belief that this emergence of excessive luxury will lead to the decay of society, right? There's even, Masacola writes in Luxury 1977, says, you know, that they believe that excess would lead to effeminacy, that like men would lose their masculinity because things were too good. And so it is in the vacuum, in the reduction of the cultural power of the previous nobility, that the question of taste emerges.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  And so you have people like the Earl of Shaftesbury, people like Alexander Pope, who write about this in the 17th and 18th century. What's interesting to me is that we're in a similar position now. We're entering a similar industrial revolution. We are faced with, or in at the eve, or maybe in the midst of immense amounts of wealth being created, and we're asking ourselves, how do we consume virtuously? And that is why the question of taste is emerging. It mirrors 17th and 18th century England in that sense.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  It's like a self-governing, like, sort of structure that emerges so that people, like, in a way, it's kind of like a survival instinct to, you know, like, so much content being out there and so much slop being out there.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  And so what's notable about this is that what Pope and Shaftesbury tells us, Shaftesbury is the first ascetician of the English tradition. He says, taste is harmony with nature, right? Because he's just kind of a deus, he says, well, if nature is God, and so nature is beauty, taste, the decisions must be in line with what, you know, unity, harmony. And that is his perspective on taste. And so the nouveau riche, the person who's tasteless, you know, I think the way Pope says, like, his house looks like a, no proportions, like a big, big gate, and then he looks like an insect next to the gate. The lake looks like an ocean, right? Everything's too big because there's too much wealth.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  And so it pushes for a natural harmonious restraint, you know? Tasteful decision because it is virtuous to make good aesthetic decisions.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's almost, we become ungovernable. Good taste means I can't be fit into this little box that the algorithm is designed for this. And it's almost, when people say the importance of taste, it's not just about having a preference, or it's not just about the aesthetics of it, but it's this bigger mission of how do you actually become ungovernable? How can you see past these algorithms and all that?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is so beautiful. Like, the virtuous point, I just keep ruminating on it. How do you think, how else do you think taste manifests beyond just like aesthetic preference in the digital age?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  I mean, what's interesting to me is that I think it could be effectuated around so many different facets of one's life, right? If it is truly virtue, then virtue is about like daily actions.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Not to be like guru and self-helpy, but like, one can make tasteful decisions in many different spheres of life. I do like, in SF, when people talk about like taste and also problems to find, right? And there are virtuous problems and some problems that are a bit less virtuous perhaps.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  But fundamentally, it is a question of how to deal with abundance, right? Right now, we have abundance of intelligence, abundance of capabilities, and it is a question of how to deal with that so that this abundance does not wreck and destroy society. That is the purpose and the function of taste.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  In SF speak, we call it like signal to noise ratio.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Signal to noise ratio.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  That's like the very SF way of putting it. How would you like compare and contrast sort of the, like, you know, we have like the dime square phenomenon in New York. It's a very different cultural landscape. And then we have SF, and SF is like the complete opposite of all of that. How do you, do you see these cultures sort of like merging or talking to each other? Like, how do you see that, how do you see them evolving?

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not American, so I feel, I feel very much like Alexandre Tocqueville, like I'm here and I'm just in America and I'm seeing how things are.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  It's a good term.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  So I think, I think it's, it's all very fascinating to me. I'm learning as I'm going what the different parts of the culture are. You know, I met quite a bit of, I mean, I'm quite a bit of rationalist here and I'm kind of learning about that culture. I'm famously banned from less wrong.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Why?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Why? What happened? Why? How did that happen?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  You say certain things and suddenly you're banned from there.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  It happens.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I, I was trying to have like, I think, what was a healthy, productive debate. The essay that got me banned actually ended up being a talk that I gave at Beta Works, the VC fund in New York. It's called The Devil You Know, so it's still out there. I think it's cogent and sensible. I don't know why exactly I got banned, but sometimes you speak truth to power and then things go bad for you. But, you know, you learn and then, and I'm, there's the language, there's a vernacular here. It's very specific, signal to noise, agency, all that stuff.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  And I mean, New York is like highly diverse. It's, there's everything from dime square to, you know, like specific enclaves in the Bronx that are completely different.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  But I think what I'm learning more as I'm traveling the United States and actually asking people these questions about technology is that every single region has its own particularities, frankly. Like, I'm going to LA tonight, and LA has its own culture, its own thing going on. And the way that they use their tech is very different. And the way that they talk about it is very different.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  And same thing in New York, and same thing when I go to Miami, or I'm spending a lot of time in Texas as well. So all these places have different relationships with their language, their tech, and how they use their software. Like, when I'm on a plane and I'm sitting next to a young person, I'm always looking at their phone. And like, I ask them a question. Okay, I was on the, I was at the San Francisco Art Book Fair yesterday. It was two, two young girls talking about how she broke up with a guy because he was texting her too much. And I was like, interesting. What is the proper amount of time that he should have texted you? Mind you, the guy texted him, texted her 14 times. And so it's like, okay, is there an acceptable amount of time, right? This is a novel mode of communication, which comes with its new sets of rules.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And maybe she has a set of rules, and the girl was like, oh no, I kind of like it, he's obsessed, right? And like, we have to define these things societally because otherwise, you know, you grow up, you're 16, and you don't know what it means to be texted 14 times, right? So, yeah, that's kind of like the ever, ever ongoing research as I like move around the United States and try to understand how people use their technology.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  How people use their technology? Or is the conversation more recently how people are interacting with AI? Or even the sentiment on AI itself?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  That's very interesting. I mean, so this is, I think, the biggest difference that I've seen, for the most part. And this might be, you know, a stated versus revealed preference. I find that Americans don't like AI. AI is a very broad term, a very broad umbrella here. Because they all use chat. And like, I love it, I love, I love chat, but they don't like AI. Does that make sense? There's like a bit of a divergence there. There's a, there's a, the boogeyman of the data center, there's the boogeyman of like, I'm going to lose my job. But, you know, if you take a look at Anthropic Survey, they surveyed 85,000 people to ask how they were using their AI for career advancements, like at work or life management. And so when I talk to mothers in Brian tags, like, oh yeah,

• 25:51Speaker 00

  like, I had a leak in my, in my faucet, whatever, I took a photo, and in about an hour or two, I was able to fix that thing. I love that.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  But to them, it's kind of like Google. And it's, that's not the thing that replaces their work and it's going, you know, put them on unemployment. So there's a bit of, once again, a language issue here around what does this, what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that's coming in a somewhat near potential future?

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  And that hasn't been really sort of split. The good thing, I guess, from an AI perspective, that people, for the most part, still like essentially free chat.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  That's like quite useful.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Yeah, I think that's absolutely fascinating. I was literally at a mass yesterday because my cousin was in town, and like our aunt made us go to mass. And the Pope, or not the Pope, the priest there was like anti-AI. He was like giving like an anti, and he was like an ex-software engineer. So it was really fascinating. Do you think like we're going to trend towards a more, like maybe a more rigorous like categorization of what AI is so that people can actually be like, okay, I disagree with this part, but I do agree with this part? Do you think like techno-optimism will be on the rise? Like, where do you think the current, will it stay very like, you know, segmented?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Tough question, not a seer, but my sense is techno-optimism will be on the rise once the claimed benefits of the technology are aligned with the desires and interests of American constituents. What do Americans want? A wife, some food, some clothes to feed their children, right? Then the world is God, the God, the God, Heron. It's quite, it's, it's simple, right? We all know kind of like the picture of the American dream, which, you know, in many ways, when you tell us, okay, put it very simply. Even Dave Chappelle says this one of his specials says, "You never get between a man and his bread."

• 27:43Speaker 00

  So I don't know who thought it was a good idea to go on national television, tell people they're gonna lose their job. But if I'm an American, which I'm not, of course, but I wouldn't want to lose my job. Because that's how I feed my family. It's kind of very simple, frankly.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  And I think the thing that I love with doing all my research is that I get to talk to people who put in very blunt terms, which, you know, I could have written like a five-page report on this. You know, make a paper out of all this, but it's quite simple. You know, people want to be employed.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Right, you're right. So it's more of the threat to employment, you think, that is just like?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think your average person cares about existential risks, frankly.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Right, no, totally, I agree.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  I wonder too, if maybe the people who are talking about this, the journalists who are talking about this, their algorithms themselves are also extra biased to find the things that are going to get people to be super hyper-aware or scared or monger, fear monger.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  At R2S and 131, we have a paper coming out specifically on that. Same thing with the hetero pessimism. We're gonna be analyzing about 5,000 videos on AI to sort of determine what is the current sort of positive, negative, and see how it checks over time. It's gonna be one of our indexes that we publish in next month.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Another question, because we touched on this briefly. Do you think we're getting better or worse at social cues? Because one could make the argument that there are more social cues to keep track of now that we're online.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  And like now, a social cue is like the story-like. You know, like, we are getting literally more, and we have to keep track of more. But at the same time, I feel like IRL, there's like a sentiment that everyone's just getting more like awkward, you know? Like, people are less like well-socialized in the real world. So what do you think?

• 29:22Speaker 00

  I think everyone should be charm-maxing, you know? I think we should lean charm-maxing, yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  You know, the little wave, little finger, and little wink. Because for the most part, I think there's a lot of beauty in these sort of human-to-human interactions. We've all heard about the Gen Z stare. You know, you, you ask for your coffee and you get the...

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Now imagine the Gen Alpha stare.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  So, but the funny thing is, there was this big event happening in New York called the Summer of LUD, right? And it's this sort of grassroots Gen Z, Gen Alpha movement. People try to reject their phone and just go into the park together, dancing, having all these events. I mean, Washington Post and Wired, I think, reported about this. So I think you're seeing a bit of a pushback against the infringement of technology across all facets of life. But I think it is very difficult, right? Think about your book of etiquette that your grandma might have had on a table. This is what you're supposed to do at a restaurant. This, when you meet someone, shake their hands. And now you have this times like all the different apps you're on.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  I can ask the studio, like, what's an acceptable amount of time to respond to someone via text? Somebody'll say 24 hours, somebody'll say three days. And these, and people feel very differently about these behaviors, right? Someone might be insulted that you take 24 hours. But you're like, no, I'm a 72, I'm texting like email. I'm a 72-hour kind of person.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  And you have to hold these rules, not only just for yourself, but for all different peoples and people in your life, which is highly difficult.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  You have to calibrate to somebody's like online etiquette, like whenever you meet them.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  It's like a different rules for what you do online versus in person. And no one has the guidebook for that yet.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  And whereas like, culture usually is somewhat ethnicity-based or nation-based, like, I'm French-Canadian, when I meet someone, I give them my bees. I kiss them on the cheek. The culture online is not specific to what a person looks like, but more which platforms they're on. I would argue that there's a Tumblr culture, right?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  There's definitely a Twitter culture.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Instagram culture.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  It's interesting, even for MTS, because we're trying to figure out the algorithms for the different, you know, for X has a very specific culture that they want. Instagram has a very specific culture that they want. And you have to try to figure out how to blend all of these together.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  And it's almost like, like even in real life, when you meet someone, you can tell which platform they're on the most.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You just know how they talk.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, based off of like what words they use. Like, yeah, like sense of humor, I think, is very platform-specific now.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  My friends say I have Twitter lingo in my everyday vernacular. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I don't know how that...

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Like, I remember when I got my first job, my manager was like, "You talk internet." Like, I was like, wow.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  You talk internet.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I do know we're at time, but Ruby, I did want to thank you for joining us today. And maybe one last thing for you is, you are a professor at NYU, specifically in the Integrated Design and Media Lab. What do you think is the most interesting thing that your students are curious about for this next decade?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  I mean, my students are sort of gung-ho about using AI. Like, they quite love it, especially because we're interdisciplinary. So you might be an engineer, like all my students are engineers, but they might not know how to fabricate. And so the ability to be like, okay, I want to make a robot. And then having access to that information, it changes your thesis quite drastically. Because before, maybe you'd find the information, we have a lot of TA's, a lot of help overall. But I've actually seen an increase in like the size and the scope of the projects. People feel like they are able to tackle them now.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  So that's always super, super exciting. And I specifically, I teach thesis, so that's the final grad program project. So that's very, very exciting. And then, as always, you know, the goal is not to just make something cool and big, but to be critical and to think about it. So we always try to push them to be, you know, intentional and very conscientious in what they build.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Totally. That's a great place to wrap.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, thank you so much, Ruby, for joining us.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  This was so awesome.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals

• 33:57Speaker 00

  are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.