I see things all the time where I'm like, man, that is a load of shit and like right now

I could tweet about that and so many people would chie-five me and be like you got him

And it's so like we should be roasting this person, right? We should be drinking on this person

The instinct to do that is just so intense, but actually like every time you do that you make the place worse

Yeah, we all make the place not the place we want to be the place that we hate

I'm John Favreaux, welcome to Offland

Hey everyone, my guess this week is Charlie Warzel, who writes for the Atlantic and has an

excellent newsletter there called Galaxy Brain that you should absolutely check out

Charlie's beat is basically exactly what this podcast is about

Which is how the internet affects our behavior, our culture, and politics

The big difference is we've been doing this for six episodes and he's been covering this topic for about 10 years

Long before it was cool to point out that Facebook is destroying our democracy

And that's what I wanted to talk to him about

It's been a little over a month since Facebook whistleblower Francis Hogan shared tens of thousands of internal

Company documents with reporters and the SEC and spoke out about the harm that the platform is causing

And there's been a lot of focus since then on Facebook's role in spreading misinformation

They're failure to enforce their own content rules

Instagram's effects on young people and a bunch of other alarming revelations

But as someone who's reported on Facebook and other social media platforms for more than a decade

Charlie thinks the real problem is more fundamental

That Facebook's original sin is the architecture of the platform itself

And then maybe human beings just aren't meant to be connected at this scale

...