Social Media Is Addictive, And It Increases Misunderstandings, Conflict, And Divisiveness - All While Sucking Up Your Time And Attention

while creating a cyber-profile of you to a very deep extent, engaging in psychological manipulation and experimentation - you're the lab rat, and wasting your valuable time...

What algorithmically-driven social media is very good at, is driving wedges between people, in breaking up communities into warring factions neither of whom listen to each other. And then these factions are further split up, until the community exists no longer but is simply a geographical grouping of atomized individuals, each glued to a screen. And this very effectively lays the basis for totalitarianism:

“For totalitarianism to flourish, [Hannah Arendt] posited, two requisite ingredients must coalesce, forming a kind of unholy alliance: Terror and ideology.
 
In order to effectively terrorize a population, Arendt contended, man must first be separated both from his fellow man and from his own, inner self. He must be isolated, cut off from his support networks, both external and internal, outflanked societally and infiltrated mentally. 
 
At the societal level, Arendt followed the words and deeds of her philosophical mentors, Socrates and Aristotle, who contended that man is fundamentally a social - which is to say, a political - animal. Socrates, for his part, demonstrated this daily through avid engagement with his fellow citizens, the demos, in the ancient Athenian marketplace of ideas, known as the Agora. Though he never wrote anything down himself, he led what Arendt herself famously formulated as the vita activa - or the “active life” - in which he spoke truth to power, at least as he identified it, and called into question accepted dogma of the day. The resulting dialogues would form the basis for that eponymous and indispensable method with which we still associate the Father of Western Philosophy to this day. It is no small irony then that, the city which brought democracy to the world, voted by majority to have Socrates put to death on the twin charges of corrupting the youth and asebeia - impiety, or introducing new deities into the accepted pantheon.
 
After the trial and death of Socrates, the gadfly’s closest student, Plato, led the world of philosophy on a kind of inward journey, a detour which Arendt characterized as the vita contemplativa - or the “contemplative life.” This she viewed as a grave error, one that saw man eschew the objective reality of his natural surroundings, including the fellow individuals with whom he shared them, in favor of isolated theorizing, subjective abstraction and generally nihilistic omphaloskepsis. Thus, Arendt argued, did society become gradually atomized, composed of discrete individuals who were disengaged from the wider public discourse, the vita activa, that mighty Athenean aegis which shielded man against the lurking totalitarian impulse. 
 
Aristotle, too, recognized man as a fundamentally political animal, able to most fully realize his own, individual freedom within the context of a community (from household to city-state) in which he could live and thrive. For Aristotle, although the concept of “political man” was a function primarily of his nature, specifically in his unique linguistic capabilities, which enables him to seek, discern and articulate truth and virtue, its ultimate expression was something entirely differentiated from mere biology, his flesh and bones and material makeup. From his very name to the will of his mind and the consequent actions that carry him through life, Aristotle’s idea of man as a political, social being was bound up with the understanding that this, too, guarded against the worst ills of his nature. “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected,” he wrote in Politics, “so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice.”
 
To reduce humans to apolitical animals, to alienate them from one and other, to number them, to tag them, and to dehumanize them. This is what Stalin meant when he said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic.”
 
Once man was rent from his community, “a clod washed away by the sea,” to marshal Donne’s famous words, he was left prone, exposed to still a more profound, insidious disjunction; the estrangement even from “the self” as an independent agent of reason. For Arendt, it was this interior citadel of the mind that represented the individual’s last stand against totalitarian ideological infiltration; the ability to hold an inner dialogue with one’s own conscience, to weigh countervailing impulses, to observe the same position from different angles, to entertain discordant ideas without necessarily subscribing to one or either of them. In short, to think for oneself.

The effect of this dual severing, the simultaneous external (from society) and internal (from the mind) dissociation, was to leave the individual utterly, helplessly stranded... and longing desperately for a savior. By way of analogy, we might consider how an abusive spouse employs intimidation and panoptical invigilation to monitor and then suppress his victim’s contact with the outside world, gradually cutting them off from their critical support network of family, friends and colleagues. Once his victim is isolated, the predator can begin the far more intricate undertaking of incessant psychological attack, distorting his victim’s perception of reality, gaslighting them into accepting, even appreciating, their “new normal,” a condition sometimes referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. Having dashed the outside supply lines and emptied his victim of all self-confidence, the abuser is now in a position of absolute power, able to dictate terms and translate reality, to fill his prey with whatever narrative, whatever ideology, best serves his own interests. To dominate them, in other words, totally.” Arendt, 1948

The only way to fight this is to eliminate social media from your life - and to contact your friends and get them to do likewise. This is possible only through means other than social media, because postings and direct messages are monitored and censored to prevent direct connection between people - that’s the locus of their control over your attention. The main attraction for social media is that “everyone is present” - or at least the promise of presence… but this promise is dependent on the algorithm - and connections can be altered or destroyed at the will of the platform - and conflict can be introduced into real life relationships, and those relationships can be destroyed. If they can keep you dependent on their media platform for the possibility, the promise, of contacts with friends and family, breaking away will be very difficult and painful. Every person they enthrall is a source of monetization - and businesses out to maximize profit don’t throw it - or its source - away. Even after you go away, they will try to suck you back in, by making their social network ubiquitous - you buy a product - and the product has a facebook page for the “user community” - and once you are out, you can’t see over that wall. The only way to see what’s there - if anything - is to get sucked back in. I see social media - and facebook - for precisely what they are - and refuse the enticements… But this is the way it is for any addiction, whether meth or facebook.

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/