Will You Sacrifice the Short Term for the Long Term?

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We ask that corporate power and economics be shifted away from the short term investors and toward the long term investors like those. A real for something to be meaningful, as a certification, as a signifier, it has to actually be painful. The fact that it's somewhat difficult is the thing that makes it valuable. So at the end of the day, will anyone really be willing to sacrifice the short term for the long term? I don't know, it's an experiment. We're going to find out,. But let us have an end to all this rhetoric about changing the world. If we're really just in it for the quick return, i'd likea we dispense with that

At Center for Humane Technology, we often talk about multipolar traps — which arise when individuals have an incentive to act in ways that are beneficial to them in the short term, but detrimental to the group in the long term. Think of social media companies that compete for our attention, so that when TikTok introduces an even-more addictive feature, Facebook and Twitter have to mimic it in order to keep up, sending us all on a race to the bottom of our brainstems.

Intervening at the level of multipolar traps has extraordinary leverage. One such intervention is the Long Term Stock Exchange — a U.S. national securities exchange serving companies and investors who share a long-term vision. Instead of asking public companies to pollute less or be less addictive while holding them accountable to short-term shareholder value, the Long-Term Stock Exchange creates a new playing field, which incentivizes the creation of long-term stakeholder value.

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re airing an episode of a podcast called ZigZag — a fellow member of the TED Audio Collective. In an exploration of how technology companies might transcend multipolar traps, we're sharing with you ZigZag’s conversation with Long Term Stock Exchange founder Eric Ries.

CORRECTION: In the episode, we say that TikTok has outcompeted Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. In fact, TikTok has outcompeted Facebook, but not yet YouTube or Instagram — TikTok has 1 billion monthly users, while YouTube has 2.6 billion and Instagram has 2 billion. However, we can say that TikTok is on a path toward outcompeting YouTube and Instagram.

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