Meet the cofounder of the franchiseable social radio station and transmedia juggernaut in America’s Heartland that won the hearts of America — **WWW.SONGA.LIVE* 👀*
Before I belonged, I didn’t. I was a data miner who wrote the disgracebook algorithms that made media less social. I was the son of an oil miner in a small field in the plains of West Texas. You might know the company I cofounded by a different name. I bet you use the platform I built too — probably even a little bit too much. Well, I used your data. And I became the company’s CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer, but I was later reviled as its Chief Manipulation Officer, because my algorithms manipulated—and sold—
I had hoped to create joy and connection in the world, but I was paid handsomely by our Shareholders at Sequoia Capitol™ on the bottom line, so I drove traffic to our platform using the emotions that sold best—Anger and Division, Hate and Fear.
When we started scrolling, we stopped livin’, and lovin’. When my heart and life grew dark, I finally lost my Self.
But the greatest tragedy came later. As our screens got smaller, so did our gatherings, until our screens got so small that we didn’t gather at all.
I sold the eyeballs that those negative feelings drew to companies for a massive profit. And as the social media landscape I helped architect tore apart society’s fabric—and millions of families along with it—my bank account grew beyond imagination. But along the way, I lost my imagination,my joy, and ultimately, my family too.
Wyoming, before he changed his name and became the one named enigma that the world’s come to know him by, was my rival for Shy Ann’s love, and once upon a time, he was also my brother. We had two different mothers: Mine, the sister of a game theorist who’d won the Nobel Prize in Economics. [**Uncle John Nash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.)** was a novel thinker known in Nobel circles for his theories, helping the world better understand the interconnectedness of our societal fabric, the very fabric I’d destroyed with the algorithms that fascinated me as a young engineer at disgracebook.
I’d never really taken his Nash Equilibrium to heart, because the prisoners my uncle saw, Wyoming (“Wy”) and I, we were trapped in our own Prisoner’s Dilemma, fighting for our father’s attention in a game where no player benefitted while the others strategy remained unchanged. Uncle John solved The Prisoners Dilemma.
Wy and I could never release ourselves from that prison of our own making, the one my father helped create.
They called him domineering. Wy and I played the same game growin up, our father’s game.
Me, the unseen son, in Wyoming’s shadow—quiet, overanalytical, overlooked. But during those hot Texas summers, when Wy would leave St. Louis and come to our father’s ranch,
We’d fight for his affection, convinced it was a winner-take-all-game for our father’s love. He liked it that way.
I manufactured crisis and played the Victim. I’d inflate my successes and play the Hero. None of it seemed to buy my father’s love which was never for sale, as much as he pretended it could be bought. Wy accused me of manipulation. So, it only made sense I’d pursue a career in it.
We lost touch as I went to MIT for a degree in computer science. I wasn’t done running, trying to prove myself. So, I went to France for an MBA from INSEAD. Everyone was obsessed with marketing and accounting classes, but for me, it was all about distribution.
But what I was distributing out into the world was greed and selfishness, borne from the scarcity mindset our father had instilled in us as kids, and mirrored in the capitalist system that I entered after graduation: the one that pitted us all, against each other.