Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. Today we examine how platforms that monetize your attention are merging with state power. We'll hear how TikTok's new owners include Trump ally Larry Ellison, how DHS sent hundreds of subpoenas to unmask anonymous ice critics, how Rings's Super Bowl ad

cheerfully introduced AI-powered neighborhood surveillance, and how the social media addiction

trials that are being likened to the big tobacco settlement of the 90s are finally exposing

what these companies knew about the harmful nature of their products all along.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 60 minutes

today include All In With Chris Hayes, Today Explained, The Global Story, On the Media,

the Muckrake political podcast, and downstream.

Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four

sections. Section A, lawsuits, section B, TikTok, section C, platform power, and section D, attention harms.

But first, a reminder to check out our new show solved on the Best of Left YouTube channel.

We're really proud of the show we're making and think you'll get real value out of it.

Plus, you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube.

So thanks in advance for all of your reviews, likes, subscribes, and comments.

That's all on the best of left YouTube channel linked in the show notes.

And now, on to the show.

I know. And now, on to the show. I think there's two ways to tell the once upon a time story.

One with continuity and one with discontinuity.

The one with continuity is once upon a time, there are people, and they looked for things to fill their minds.

And that started in the caves. And it started

hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the story of humanity is a set of innovations in what we

put into our minds, where we allow our conscious minds to sit, what objects we have them hold.

There's some really interesting anthropological research that I talk about in the book, which is that basically hunters and gatherers don't really have the experience of boredom. That boredom is a product of what we would call civilization or the sort of 10,000 years after, you know, BC, when hunter gatherers sort of sit down in the same place and start having the kinds of societies that we've had. And then through that, we have this ascending set of ways that people pass the time and amuse each other. There's relationships, of course. There's the things we do. There's toil. But there's also stories that are told and there's Olympian games that are played and

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