Max Fisher has evaluated the influence social media can have upon himself, and his observation of Myanmar and elsewhere has given him pause. He has implemented sophisticated means of defeating social media’s pervasive methods for learning enough about him to push his buttons and put him in thrall.
Unfortunately, not many of us put enough weight upon the mind control social media can exert. And few of us know how to make ourselves invisible and yet stay involved.
Max Fisher has spoken out. The danger is clear. The evasive tactics needed are arcane for most of us.
Are we listening?
2
Take a look at today’s NYT article about Yuval Noah Harari: “Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer”. Harare asks: “How do you live when you realize […] the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? [This is one of] the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”
That article says Harrari “worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.”
1
In 1450 the printing press was invented, by 1475 it was really up and running. In the next century it produced over 100 million books, about two for every adult in Europe. And so people learned to read. The result was not enlightenment, but violent argument as they all read the bible and found they disagreed about what it meant. Suddenly the forum of public debate, till then mostly left to the leisured and priestly educated, became flooded with all sorts of half-educated people and their half-baked ideas, eager to prove the old maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There followed more than 100 years of religiously-inspired genocides...
In 1990 the internet was invented, by 2000 it was really up and running. In 2007 came the first smartphone and soon everyone was connected all the time. Suddenly the forum of public debate, till then mostly left to the readers of broadsheet newspapers, was flooded with Archie Bunkers, half-educated conspiracy theorists, xenophobic grandmas, anonymous online agitators and middle-aged misanthropes living in vans. Suddenly people were brought face to face with the violence of their disagreement, even as they also found silos where everyone saw things their way. The result was not enlightenment... ...
Its schismogenesis, populism and alterity (reactionary movements). Its polarization, tribalism and pathological ressentiment. Its fake news and fertile ground for every conspiracy theory known to mankind.
It’s the dying of the West…
@Justin Sigman - you are right about printing’s initial effect, but perhaps you didn’t go far enough in time to assess its long term impact. After playing a part in setting off a century or two of religious genocide by suddenly empowered half baked peasants, printing became perhaps the most positive agent of change and enlightenment so far in human history. So perhaps there may be great things to come from the digital information explosion, if it doesn’t first wipe out all of us half baked reality show fans through the decades or centuries it will take us to get there. And when we do get there it will be nothing like anything you or I are capable of imagining today. The dog barks, the caravan proceeds.......
3
“…Yet somehow the algorithm had correctly identified this as the thing likeliest to make me click, then followed me across continents to ensure that I did.”
Amos Tversky liked to say “People are not so complicated. Relationships between people are complicated.” Algorithms are an important tool in understanding these relationships, and in many respects, understanding the psychology of the human mind. The use of algorithms, if I may add, profoundly changed decision making. Human intuition, ( gut feeling ) Amos Tversky and Daniel Daniel Kahneman proved, is quite fallible.
Understanding the power of any medium is the responsibility of every adopter of that medium.Those who use it are responsible for their own demise, or aggrandization.
In my opinion, those who understand the potential and power of these technologies, and are wise enough to adopt them, will, in the long run, be radically changed by them.
2
@OAJ
"The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite."
— Thomas Sowell
2
@Justin Sigman
'in the lives of most people."
The lives of most people, particularly of those who don't have access to the newest technologies, have been positively impacted by the introduction of Behavioral economics,which sprang as a result of the theories of Amos Tversky and Daniel Daniel Kahneman.
Cheers
“these companies are conducting the largest social re-engineering experiment in human history, and no one has the slightest clue what the consequences are.”
Nor are they interested in the consequences beyond creating clicks that sell ads and make money. And there is the problem that algorithms replace humans and are not coded to be wise.
8
@John Brews ..✅✅
Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Scheler, Weber, Sartre, Deleuze, Girard and Derrida shared one deterministic theory about the origins of and escalation of communities into mass violence. Social media is perfectly designed for it: "Ressentiment"... What unfolds in comments sections and Tweets is the dark-step, the final motion in the spin-up to communal violence: Pathalogical Ressentiment, what Max Scheler called "man's lowest form of social togetherness". Its product is Psychic Contagion.
Psychic Contagion is the phenomenon of uncritically "following the crowd", or mob mentality, likened to lemmings charging over a cliff. Its identifiable by the substitution of value judgements for observational rhetoric, and adoption of epithets as descriptors leveled at an Other. Over time you see group polarization leading to inversions of social norms, and a tone of meta-physical violence escalating toward the actual. That's what these weaponized social media platforms are doing to us!
18k trolls an hour spitting epithets at each other, at the Washington Post and at Breitbart. A million more on Twitter. Who thought this was sustainable? What the Heck did these Silicon Savants think was going to happen?
3