How Media Gets Us to Mars

“Do you want to get to Mars or just write articles about it?” Well, it turns out we are going to have to write articles about Mars—lots of them—to get to Mars. For any technology we want to drive forward, we must own the discourse.

Bitcoin taught us this. If you write with more energy and more zeal than opponents, technology will win in the long run. And we don’t need just writing. We need art, literature, and movies too.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to post supporting them.

Imagine an NBA game where players believe they're playing for the same team, but only see their own points. That's how ideological movements work on social media today; we see only individual profiles, no team dashboards.

Here is how we can take a data-driven approach: Find a technology you want to advance. Analyze the sentiment around it. Determine how much content you'd have to create to swing sentiment. Then swing it.

Legacy media corporations try to optimize for prestige but often settle for optimizing for clicks. They need to pay the bills. Clicks and prestige are both measurable (the latter by awards), but both are legacy measures.

On the other hand, optimizing for sentiment around a keyword like “Mars” or “Bitcoin” is something new. It's essentially pure activism. An organization optimizing for creating sentiment around Mars or life extension would get very different results. Sentiment was hard to measure until recently, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), a computer’s ability to understand human language.

Prioritizing changing sentiment instead of clicks means creators stay ethical and avoid the trap of creating clickbait. We can all found, fund, and patronize personal media corps committed to key ideas, such as faster drug testing, self-driving cars to cut traffic fatalities, or nuclear fusion to stop climate change.

Any thesis for positive change through technology can be turned into a media company. We can fund creators to produce amazing content on life extension, brain-machine interfaces, or colonizing Mars.

Clicks and prestige would be zero-sum metrics for a decentralized activist community, but sentiment is not. You're convincing the external world something is a good idea. Fill up the sentiment bar, and we can go to Mars.