Social Media As Negativity Machine
I've been following Jaron Lanier's writings since the late 1980s...
Good to watch:
This, too:
And finally this:
“ARGUMENT TWO: QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE MOST FINELY TARGETED WAY TO RESIST THE INSANITY OF OUR TIMES
THE BUMMER MACHINE: “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”
BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. BUMMER is a machine with six moving parts:
A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives
C is for Cramming content down people’s throats
D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible
E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else
F is for Fake mobs and Faker society
Customized feeds become optimized to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realize how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
The algorithms are rarely interrogated, least of all by external or independent scientists, in part because it’s hard to understand why they work. They improve automatically, through feedback. One of the secrets of present-day Silicon Valley is that some people seem to be better than others at getting machine learning schemes to work, and no one understands why. The most mechanistic method of manipulating human behavior turns out to be a surprisingly intuitive art.
“Those who are good at massaging the latest algorithms become stars and earn spectacular salaries.“
The mass behavior modification machine is rented out to make money. BUMMER manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to BUMMER machines. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on BUMMER.” https://lanredahunsi.com/book-summary-ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now-by-jaron-lanier/
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