Mark Weinstein Podcast Transcript
Mark Weinstein joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Mark Weinstein. Mark Weinstein is a renowned tech entrepreneur, contemporary thought leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary vendors of social networking. His adventure in social media has lasted over 25 years through three award-winning personal social media platforms joined by millions of members worldwide.
He’s the author of the new book, restoring Our Sanity Online, a Revolutionary Social Framework on the Future of Social Media. Which web inventor sir Tim Burners Lees calls a “vital read”. An Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak calls a must read, a leading privacy advocate. Marks Landmark 2020 TED Talk. The rise of surveillance capitalism exposed the many infractions and manipulations by big tech and called for privacy revolution.
Mark has also been listed as one of the top eight mines in online privacy and named privacy by design ambassador by the Canadian government.
Well, good afternoon, Mark. Welcome to the show!
Mark Weinstein: Brian, great to be here. This is such an important conversation. Always is. And you’re the man. So let’s have at it.
Brian Thomas: Well, thank you sir. I appreciate it. And hailing outta LA I’m in Kansas City, we’re just a couple hours apart, so I appreciate you moving your schedule around ’cause I know you did quite a few interviews today already.
So, Mark, let’s jump right in. You’re credited withholding 13 US patents focused on privacy and data anonymization, the cornerstone of what you call restoration networking. How did these patents influence the development of your later ventures, like Mei, and how do they reflect your philosophy of user-centric design?
Mark Weinstein: You know, for our listeners, listen guys, I have a patent portfolio assigned to Mei, which is the last company that I founded. I’m currently on the board of Mei. I no longer run the company I left in 2021 to write the book, restoring Our Sanity Online. Those 13 patents are very specifically focused. On data anonymization and personalized marketing.
So way back in 2012 when everybody was focused on how do we slur data, how do we grab everybody’s data? I was focused on how do we protect everybody’s data? How do we make sure that Facebook isn’t seeing everything that I’m doing and then, you know, targeting and manipulating my thoughts, my purchase decisions, my emotions, my critical thinking, my votes.
And at this point, the portfolio has expanded to 13. I think a 14th just got approved. And so it’s really that my thinking that brought me to the IP because I was furious. I was interviewed on Fox Business the day before Facebook went public. I’m saying Facebook now ’cause it was Facebook before it was meta and this is back in 2012.
And the reason that I was interviewed on Fox was at the time and still a major broadcast network was because I was the guy willing to say, this is creepy. If I post that, you know, I need to go get some dog food and then 10 seconds later there’s a dog food ad in my brand, the brand that I’m getting that is just out of control, creepy.
And you can’t see the creep over your shoulder. This is wrong. We gotta do something about it. So I said that on Fox. I launched mwe a, uh, social network in, uh, you know, web two, and I began looking at the intellectual property and how we could actually craft systems. That serve digital marketers while protecting us and our privacy and our data.
So that’s how it started.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. And I appreciate that you’re such an advocate for protecting people’s privacy. When people were looking at maybe growth and revenue and these other things, especially the big tech companies, you were looking at data anonymization and privacy, which I think is really important.
And you did highlight that. So Mark, your TED Talk. The rise of surveillance capitalism was a clarion call for change in how big tech operates. Looking back, what trends have you seen shift or remain stubbornly stubborn in surveillance capitalism since that talk?
Mark Weinstein: And you see that’s, that’s really what we’re talking about.
So Web one, and I’m one of the early founders of social networking. There’s probably about a hundred of us around the world who were either collaborating or individually or with our own teams launched products. I launched superfamily.com and super friends.com. In the nineties, they became PC Magazine, top 100 sites.
Web one was beautiful because we weren’t thinking about bots and trolls. We weren’t thinking about targeting and manipulating users or, you know, adjusting and filtering news feeds based on an algorithm of what we wanted them to see and what we wanted to sell to them. So Web one was beautiful, web two.
Which launches sort of as after web one, which Google is part of and was helped launch and Facebook Web two was surveillance capitalism. This was the new revenue model, you know, monetizing our data, targeting, manipulating us, as I said, our thoughts, our purchase decisions, our votes, our emotions. So my TED Talk in 2020, the rise of surveillance capitalism really calls for all of us to be accountable for what sites we’re on, how we allow people to use our data, how to protect our data, and unfortunately.
Web two has been stubborn because web two has massive revenue. Uh, so, you know, Facebook became meta and Google became this huge monopoly. Meta became a huge monopoly. The federal government has tried to, you know, now break them up or limit them or interfere with them because the free market has stopped functioning.
And that’s our big issue. The free market doesn’t function anymore in big tech. And when the free market stops functioning, in other words. Brian, you or I or any of our listeners, any great or you know, new entrepreneur comes up with a great new way to craft a social media platform that is respectful and mindful of users and their data and makes the users, the customers to serve, not the product to sell.
There’s no room for them. Because meta controls what’s called the network effect, your social graph, you’re, you’re stuck right there. And they’ve interfered with any other competitors. Google same thing, you know, interfered with any other possible search engine competition. So we’ve been in this sort of stubborn moment for several years now, and there’s hope everybody, there’s a light.
And in my book, restoring Our Sandy Online, we’re gonna talk about. How we get there, you know, and it’s, it’s, we’re really right at the door.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Again, your advocacy for this is just so important. It’s really coming out. I can hear your passion back in web one days you did. I’ll just highlight your social channels there.
Super family, super friendly. Web two is where things really started to change and your TED talk on. Web two’s, surveillance, capitalism. You call for people to come together, be mindful, be alert, be aware. But this free market is essentially stopped functioning with big tech. As you mentioned. This is a big problem.
You know, the, over the years, the US government has broken up a lot of monopolies over the past 150 years. But, uh, this is definitely a problem. And the other thing is, and I’ll just. Throw this in there is, there is a backdoor channel with some of these companies to the US government and some of the spying that goes on, not just the capitalism part, right?
But also some of that spying that does kind of feel creepy. So I appreciate you unpacking all that for us. And Mark, in your book, restoring Our Sanity Online, you advocate a new category called Restoration Networking. Complete with a 13 point restoration networking constitution. What inspired this framework and which tenants do you believe are most critical and hardest to implement?
Mark Weinstein: Coming back for a moment to, you know, the idea in web two when I launched mwe, the idea of a privacy bill of rights, the idea of no manipulated news feeds, these are really important tenets to take hold of for the future. So when we look at, you know, now how do we do this? Also, everybody. So here’s what’s happening.
There’s momentum and Sir Tim burners lead, the inventor of the web, has gotten back in the game and Tim calls my book, by the way, you know, a vital read It’s vision, which I share is a digital future that prioritizes human wellbeing. This is a vital read. That’s Sir Tim Burners Lee. Now Tim has worked on a new system called Solid Solid Wallets.
Solid Pods, where we get to control our data in a decentralized way. We get to decide what sites have it, what sites don’t we get to upload, download. This is critical. It really is the functional tool of what’s called data portability. Data interoperability. Those mean the same thing where we own our data and we can upload it, for example, to Meta or download it away from meta and move to a site that better serves us, and our social graph. Right now, our social graph is stuck on places like Meta who have, you know, half the world’s population. And so this is where. The restoration networking constitution that I talk about in the book. And by the way, the book, I think everybody will be very entertained by this book ’cause I have a great sense of humor and I fact check everything, which fact checking is its own issue, which I’ll discuss in the book.
But we talk about profit sharing, safeguarding kids, user id, verification for kids while protecting whistleblowers and marginalized people on social networks. We’ve got to protect our kids. We’ve gotta protect the future of democracy, civil moderation, open source. You know, we can get rid of box and trolls.
Guys, it’s not hard. While protecting privacy, we gotta get rid of boosted content or targeting unless you’re opting into it and you’re revenue sharing. So this thing I just call data portability, you know, and paying it forward. Listen, it’s all doable. Social media. I love social media. I’m one of the guys who invented it.
One of we can fix this mess. And web’s one and two don’t do Web3 by the way, Brian, we wanna quickly touch on Web3, um, because it’s an important part of, you know, your question. So why don’t you frame one for me?
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Mark. My last question for you then is with this rapid rise of AI Web3 and evolving regulatory landscapes, what keeps you hopeful and what worries you about the future of social media?
How does your vision of restoring digital sanity account for these emerging forces?
Mark Weinstein: So, you know, uh, thank you, Brian. The Web3, and for users who aren’t really aware of it, it’s, it’s built, blockchain is the technology, and cryptocurrency is the modus operandi. It’s how, uh, the revenue model works, you know, creating cryptocurrencies and having them become valuable and the transactions therein that provide, uh, revenue for the, uh, sites.
Web3. The promises of Web3 were flawed, and we’ve seen this. There have been many social media efforts at Web3 that have failed, and this has gone on for seven or eight years now, from minds to steam it to voice and others. So the promise of Web3. Your pure anonymity, forget it. You’re totally connected to anything.
You post to the blockchain. Your idea is always connected to it, so forget anonymity there. And Web3, the blockchain can’t function at a high pace for tens of millions of users in a social media environment. Blockchain is great for financial transactions and things like that, but it doesn’t really work for social.
So when we look at, and then the the world, the world of ai. We know algorithms have been around manipulating our news feeds and our thoughts and our purchase decisions for, you know, well over a decade now, but now they’re supercharged by ai, everybody. So when you’re stuck on your feed. You know, whether you’re on the proverbial toilet or you know, it’s your, your uncle, your grandpa, or your kid, you know, you’re just stuck wherever you are because AI is masterfully in nanoseconds manipulating your brain to want to see what’s next and then want to, you know, engage with whatever it feeds you next.
It’s incredible how strong AI is and how manipulative it is. The good news is AI has a good counterpart. AI is like two sides of a coin, so we can use good ai, we can use it very effectively to weed out bots and trolls. My book has a seven point plan for bot and troll eradication, which we all really need.
Free speech depends on real people speaking, not nefarious entities. And, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of bots and trolls manipulating our thoughts and our conversations. We wanna, it’s gotta be real people. The backbone of democracy is disagreement. Guys. We’re supposed to disagree, but we like each other.
Here in America, the whole point is we can disagree with our neighbors, but we like each other. It’s just, that’s the purpose of democracy. That’s the beauty of democracy. So I worry about all of us being pigeonholed into thoughts and ideas and political beliefs based on bots and trolls. Perpetrating instead of real conversations with real people.
I worry about the future of social media. If we don’t get data portability, if we don’t get user ID verification for our kids to protect them from being targeted. Manipulated, et cetera. You know, we can really fix this and quickly we have hope in, uh, the Kids Online Safety Act, cosa, which is in Congress.
It’s bipartisan. We have hope in Kapa two Kids Online Privacy Protection Act. There’s hope. We have the Take It Down Act, which, uh, was signed into law this year, and we now need to free up the free market. The Federal Trade Commission is getting ready to rule in its case against meta, the antitrust social media case, and I’ve been deposed.
I’ve been subpoenaed, I’ve issued declarative statements. I have a lot of comments on record in the case. And I’m hopeful that one way or the other, data portability is coming, user ID verification for kids in social media is coming. We also need that on YouTube, by the way, because there are slippery slopes everywhere, YouTube, TikTok, we’ve got to protect our kids.
So I am actually very hopeful and in restoring our sanity online, I articulate exactly how we can do this right now. So everybody, we’re all part of the solution and now it’s time to get to it.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s amazing. Again, a lot to unpack, but I’ll just highlight a few things here. Yeah, Web3, blockchain, there’s, there’s a lot of promise.
It does a lot of great things, but right now they’re still working on that throughput for blockchain. As you mentioned, putting a social network, a popular social network on blockchain, uh, could, uh, kind of choke up and, and die there quickly. I know they’re working on it though.
Mark Weinstein: Let me interject right here, which, which also for our users, the idea of Web3 is monetizing your social relationships, and this is a fundamental flaw.
This is why. The previous companies have attempted this and failed because at scale, human beings don’t want their communications to be monetized. We wanna communicate authentically, you know, and the monetization puts a real heavy cheapening overlay on it. That’s also why Web3 for social isn’t working.
Please go ahead.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. No, I appreciate that. I really do just highlight some of the most important things though, is AI is out there. There’s a lot of bots being very manipulative, and I know AI can also combat a lot of that. And I agree with you, mark been around the block a few years like yourself, and we should have a friendly discourse in our disagreements, but these bots are really dividing and, and making a big division between the different views within this country and within the world.
But what I heard, data portability is coming and better h verification and protection for our kids, which I think is important. So thank you and Mark, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Mark Weinstein: Thank you, Brian. We can do this, everybody. And there’s, and we can have a great, back to the beginning of social. It was great. It made the world more harmonious. It connected us with our family, friends, and like-minded people around the world. This is where we wanna get to.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Mark Weinstein Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
