David Basiji: You mentioned that you were pessimistic in the short term and optimistic in the long term. I would characterize myself as pessimistic in the short term, and, well, not optimistic in the long term. I was wondering if you could give me some hope, and maybe explain your thinking on longer-term optimism?SB: I'm 83 and counting, and I've seen so many end-of-the-world stories over time - some of which I bought into. I thought that my old teacher, Paul Ehrlich, was right about population, and I did public things in support of his views. He was almost completely upside down, in terms of what at the time was called the “demographic transition.” And then there was the energy crisis, there was peak oil. My environmentalist friends were saying, "The end of the world is coming, not just because of population, but because we're going to run out of oil, and then we'll go crazy." Everyone said that the end of the world was coming, and it didn't. So, I've seen so many ends of the world come and go. I don't believe in them anymore.The threats often are very clear and the solutions are not - that's understandable because the threat is clear and present! You can usually see a couple of solution paths being offered. Well, the ones that will work, you don't know yet, they're still being invented. This relates to the book Scale, by Geoffrey West, which looks at how cities do everything faster - they create problems faster than anything else in the world, but they create solutions to the problems faster than the problems. And so cities are these places where solutions just pour forth at civilization scale. In the pace layer diagram that I did for civilization, there's a rural version and a city version. The city version of it goes way, way faster - people pay attention to what fashion and commerce are proposing, they occasionally mess with how the governance works, and certainly, infrastructure gets cranked out more rapidly in cities.

How do you ensure on Mastodon, given that it’s decentralized and you don’t have the power to ban users, that the space is welcoming and safe? Well, this is the kind of strange dichotomy of how it’s turned out. On the one hand, the technology itself is what allows basically anyone to host their own independent social media server, and to basically be able to do anything they want with it. There is no way for Mastodon, the company, or anyone really—except the normal law enforcement procedures—to really go after anyone specifically running a Mastodon server. The way that you would shut down a normal web site is how you would shut down a Mastodon server, there’s no difference there. So on that end, it kind of turns out to be the ultimate free speech platform. But obviously that’s basically just a side effect of creating a tool that can be used by anyone. It’s kind of like cars. Cars are used by everyone, even bad people, even for bad purposes, there’s nothing you can do about it, because the tool is out there. However, I think that the differentiating factor to something like Twitter or Facebook, is that on Mastodon, when you host your own server, you can also decide what rules you want to enforce on that server, which allows communities to create safer spaces than they could otherwise have on these large platforms that are interested in serving as many people as possible, perhaps driving engagement up on purpose to increase time people spend on the web. You can have communities that have much stricter rules than Twitter has. And in practice, a lot of them are [stricter]. And this is part of where, again, the technology intersects with guidance or leadership from Mastodon the company. I think that, through the way that we communicate publicly, we have avoided attracting a crowd of the kind of people who you would find on Parler or Gab, or whatever other internet hate forums. Instead we’ve attracted the kind of people who would moderate against hate speech when running their own servers. Additionally, we also act as a guide for anyone who wants to join. Because on our website, and our apps, we provide a default list of curated servers that people can make accounts on. And through that, we make sure that we curate the list in such a way that any server that wants to be promoted by us has to agree to a certain basic set of rules, one of which is that no hate speech is allowed, no sexism, no racism, no homophobia, or transphobia. And through that, we ensure that the association between Mastodon, the brand, and the experience that people want is that of a much safer space than something like Twitter.

Part of the appeal of an art gallery or museum, where our traditional notions of curation come from, is that they have pieces of work that no one else does. This isn’t the case online – many people who attempt to aggregate the best content online are often sharing the same content as someone else. How do you differentiate yourself in a space full of re-hashed content? Brain Pickings is a highly curatorial endeavor. And the art of curation isn't about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large. Every piece of content on Brain Pickings is hand-picked for embodying the sort of cultural interestingness at the core of our curatorial vision – it's creative, compelling and makes a meaningful contribution to the world; it offers a justification to be curious and enriches you in the process of indulging that curiosity. Great curation is also about pattern-recognition – seeing various pieces of culture and spotting similarities across them that paint a cohesive picture of a larger trend. Brain Pickings addresses this with our signature "omnibus" posts that spotlight 3-10 examples of a larger creative or cultural trend – cross-disciplinary conferences, urban guerrilla interventions, vintage-inspired posters for modern movies, hand-cut book sculptures, you name it.

Werner Herzog’s meditations on a connected world

"Documentarists of Japan, No. 12: Koreeda Hirokazu." Interviewed by Tanaka Junko and Aaron Gerow. Documentary Box 13 (1999): 1-10. access

I look for a couple of threads. One is the combination of ego and humility. Let’s be honest, a lot of C.E.O.s are ego-driven people. But they also have to be humble in some very precise ways around ideas and decisions, and being able to change their mind. That’s an idiosyncratic combination.Another thread is intellectual curiosity. They ask a lot of “why” questions, and they’re comfortable with the ambiguous nature of things that are unknown.The last one is that you want somebody who’s ultra-resilient, because there are just so many trials and tribulations to building a business. One day it can feel like you’re on the top of the world, and the next day it’s all crumbling down. Can you compartmentalize it, put it in context and enjoy it?