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Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Professor Andy Shibilski.

Andy is an experimental psychologist and the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute,

which is dedicated to the social science of the internet.

Andy is, I would describe him as part of what I would call the backlash to the backlash to tech.

So I'm sure you're all familiar with the backlash.

There have been countless books and articles in the last few years about how smartphones and social media

and things like that are making us stressed out and insecure and disconnected from each other

and so on. And increasingly prominent people in tech have been signing on to the backlash as

well, like founders or early employees of Facebook or Twitter have been expressing concern and regret about the effects of their creations.

So then there's the much smaller backlash to the backlash, people arguing that the case against tech is actually much weaker than it seems.

So that is where Andy comes in.

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