Social media delenda est. Reputation systems, politico-cultural tribalism, and human cognitive vulnerability w/r/t viral information have turned the entire cultural landscape into anarcho-1984.
The scenes from this article exceed any dystopian novel I've ever read. Humans have spent centuries building up social structures to eliminate our worst excesses. Social media is tearing those structures down again.
We’re turning our own human ecosystems into a panopticon, no wonder newbies are scared of straying off. Anything can and will be used against you, eventually.
(I’m not talking about fascist-kind repression and dissent wipeout, that’s out of our collective memory anyway and eventually only a problem for politicized individuals. No, it’s the much more concrete and pervasive peer control made possible by Facebook, Instagram and the like. It applies to anyone, even the most bland conformist and disengaged people )
Eventually we’ll develop a concept of public persona that takes no shame for the past. Next generation probably, after recognizing their parents were panicked fawns blinded by headlights.
Social media has turned the internet into a consensus enforcing, group signaling machine that overwhelms reasoned opinion and moves against dissent like an immune system. Nowhere on the internet is safe from this monster.
It is nothing less than exhausting to watch how people who frequent various types of social media have been driven to devolve into the worst humanity has seen in a long time short of causing physical harm to each other. I have watched as a couple of local FB groups that I used to just monitor for local information go down to the gutter on almost every single post.
People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.
It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?
Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.
And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.
And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.
The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.
I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.
It doesn’t matter how autonomous and free thinking you are or any other individual is— social media is transforming us into a collective. Like ants excreting pheromones, our actions in aggregate are more powerful than any individual, the result being whatever results from this untested cocktail of biology, language and global connection. It’s unprecedented and borderline unpredictable.
Nobody is in a position to directly manipulate our path... but our trajectory, if nudged in the right place and time, can have massive consequences in the future. Both the left and the right in the US are dysfunctional as a result of trajectories that were nudged decades ago.
When I started to write this post, I had no intention of creating this rambling essay that might well come straight from a comspiracy nutjob. It is certainly not well supported by any facts that I have readily available. But I really need to vent, so here it is anyway:
I too get the perception (through media!) that the world is becoming more dystopian. But I think that there may be more to that than meets the eye.
I am seriously starting to wonder if social media and internet based media in general have a big part in that.
This is not a single issue IMO. There are several aspects to it: people get offer a much wider spectrum of sources of information and generally tend to prefer thise that have slants more in line with their own views. Also, bad news is more sensational and spreads wider and faster than good news. This lead to a bias in what is reported. Thirdly, and most damning, social media is not only supporting these bubbles that people build around themselves. They are being exploited by actors who post material that is designed to undermine our perception and our opinions. This is apparantly done in subtle ways. Some internet shitstorms are apparently engineered using bots to shape public views on certain topics. This seems to be done to subtly, slowly and purposefully undermine public opinion and steer it towards extreme views.
There was a recent study undertaken of s sample of Twitter messages to Rian Johnson about Star Wars VIII. A substantial fraction of the negative comments were apparently manufactured using bots. This activity appears to be linked to a political motivation, but I do not know how the study reaches that conclusion. But if it is true, it is quite disturbing.
When creating the world wide web, the idealists among us wanted to bring the world closer together and make it more connected and peaceful. I get the suspicion that these good intentions instead bring us closer to an age of renewed nationalism, intolerance and totalitarianism, which is created by maliciously exploring the very freedoms we wanted for everyone.
I sometimes wonder if this is not just the novelty of social media, but rather the new normal. ie, perhaps social media will always be this divisive? This is a very limited metaphor, but it reminds me of how a moth circles around a flame. Usually, a moth would use the Moon (or Sun) to navigate, which is focused to infinity. The flame is close by, and the way the moth's natural circuitry works causes it to malfunction. A straight line becomes an inward spiral, towards the flame.
The basic problems of social media are nothing new to human behavior: tribalism, moral judgement / righteousness, extremist viewpoints.
But I wonder if it's a bit like the moth and the flame. With so many extreme opinions from so many strangers, we begin spiraling to more extreme positions, and taking sides in a more extreme fashion. Under normal conditions extreme opinions can still exist, but they are usually tempered by contact with other people. Even when extremity existed in the past, it at least appeared to be stable over time. ie, you'd have single group with unified (albeit extreme) ideas. People are normally meant to be socially and morally judgemental. (to what degree, and about what is up for some debate, but as an animal we like to make moral judgements.) But, they're also meant to find consensus within a community. Well, the internet breaks down some of that consensus building, while also introducing and amplifying more and more extreme positions. I really wonder that like the moth, social media breaks our normal intuition for social judgement and coalition building.
And lastly, I wonder if it's any surprise that things seem to have gotten crazier since most have been on quarantine -- away from normal people, but glued to our screens. Maybe that's just anecdotal on my part, though.
Unregulated Social Media is a toxic death spiral for human relations, just like unregulated capitalism is for humans and the environment we share with this planet's inhabitants.
Social media is in a way a hack similar to money and property law, where you can carry or own more than you actually could in natural way without losing it or having to leave behind, only that this time it's with the local space that hooks into the global space and vice versa.
Smashing natural boundaries like that creates anomalies that we have to learn to deal with. I think it's also something that will enable us to spread to other planets sooner or later, hopefully.
Hacking natural boundaries and overcoming the self regulating mechanism that otherwise would take place could be painful in a way and bite us back. But just think about the global exchange of knowledge, people getting interested in things they never thought they'd have access to under pre internet circumstances. A hell of a ride indeed..
Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye.
The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains.
Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces.
What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp.
All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest.
So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time.
Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere.
I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality.
The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect.
I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society less complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance.
That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.
The system wants to prevent the masses from thinking a different way, as the official way is.
This is 1984 and even better. By giving "credits" (gamification) the people are like the frog in the boiling water. When they recognize it, it is to late.
Is this the natural development of social media: Who does not conform to the masses, will be spit out by society?
Many dictators try to get their nations "in line" by using such tactics. "We are all one people -- we act as one people".
Is social media and gamification the solution for the wildest dreams of dictators?
Individualism must and will be killed in such a system. Only one Individuum can exist in the long run: The queen/king of the bee colony.
Social media has been the driver of an enormous level of democratic empowerment, an unprecedented new degree of bottom-up communication. I think society hasn't experienced such a structural shift to political power distribution since the printing press's arrival in the West. Unlike China, the West had no central authority, so what was printed and distributed could not be properly suppressed.
The counter-reaction to this, I believe, is the increased concentration of wealth and push toward monopoly and control.
If democracy prevails, I believe social media, like Youtube, Reddit etc will drive a level of cultural, scientific and technological enlightenment to equal the Renaissance.
If autocracy prevails, if the whole world falls under the dominion of a single authority, we will all end up in one single shithole country.
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