10 Reasons to Get Rid of Social Media Today
M any of the ideas in Jaron Lanier'southward new book start off pretty familiar – at least, if y'all are agile on social media. Yet in every affiliate there is a principle then elegant, so neat, sometimes however beautiful, that what is billed every bit straight polemic becomes something much more profound.
The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by advantage but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come up, is well known. But Lanier puts information technology like this: "The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm's experiments … Considering the stimuli from the algorithm doesn't mean annihilation, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn't responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That procedure – of condign hooked on an elusive mirage – is addiction."
The restless scrolling, the clammy cocky-reproach subsequently … we could recognise that as addiction quite easily, but the mathematical machinery for having created it makes horrible sense (Lanier isn't that interested in culprits, though he finds all of Silicon Valley pretty callow).
He wears his tech credentials lightly, as he tin afford to, having been at that place for the creation of the internet; he was chief scientist of the engineering science office of Internet2 and in that location in the very commencement conversation-rooms, whence he draws the decision that I found the least convincing: even at its incipience, online communication tended towards the hostile. "Sometimes, out of nowhere, I would go into a fight with someone … It was and then weird. We'd start insulting each other, trying to score points." Since this all predated algorithmic manipulation, and cannot be blamed on Facebook, he concludes that we have pack behaviours and solitary behaviours: in a pack, we become locked in internecine competition; on our own "we're more than free. We're cautious, just besides more capable of joy."
This flattens out some vital distinctions: there's a difference between getting together to talk to strangers about why your celibacy is a woman's fault, and mustering online to first the Arab jump. Silicon Valley has a distinctive way of looking at things: have big idea; iterate; set; iterate again. It works well in software design, but it'southward possible that to apply to very complex systems (like human being beings), the big thought has to be refined a niggling more before information technology'due south tested.
Lanier explicitly addresses this in chapter eight, Social Media Doesn't Desire You lot to Have Economic Dignity, every bit he describes how our modern reality was seeded by that mindset, those peculiar yeah/no certainties of the web'southward earliest creators. The internet was built with no mode to brand or get payments, no way to find other people you lot might like. "Everyone knew these functions … would be needed. We figured it would be wiser to let entrepreneurs make full in the blanks than to leave that task to government … We foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies."
Given the network event – that Uber only works if everyone is on it – a thou flowers were never going to blossom. At that place'southward only room for ane and it's a Venus fly trap. The same libertarian spirit also instituted the peculiar economics of the cyberspace: software had to be costless, because only that fashion would it be open ("everyone knew that software would eventually become more of import than law, and then the prospect of a world running on hidden code was dark and creepy"). Nonetheless that meant programmers wouldn't exist paid: they would create free code and brand money by solving problems later.
And so the gig economy was built-in, this highly skilled field spreading its insecurity to low-skilled ones, food delivery, retail. Neo-Marxians would accept something to say about capital in all this but Lanier emphatically doesn't claim to have all the answers. "Please accept what you can use from me. I know I don't know everything," he says in a winsome footnote.
His almost dispiriting observations are those about what social media does to politics – biased, "non towards the left or correct, but downwards". If triggering emotions is the highest prize, and negative emotions are easier to trigger, how could social media non make y'all sad? If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe non plummet into the partial delineation of reality that people like you lot also savor? How could empathy and respect for divergence thrive in this surroundings? Where'southward the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, simulated news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?
I finished this stark but exuberant account non fearing for the future and then much as amazed the world wasn't already fifty-fifty worse.
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