As a matter of fact, it is uncanny how much the advertising I see on
Facebook matches my interests. It is also uncanny how much they
apparently know about me in making other suggestions. They make
suggestions of potential friends I might want to add. Recently one of
the friend suggestions they have made is the husband of a cousin of mine
whom I have had no contact with since my childhood. I have no idea how
Facebook connected me to her. I certainly have never mentioned her on line.
___
George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
On 1/14/2021 4:01 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Yesterday, I heard Zephyr Teachout, who is a professor here in New York and who
ran against Governor Cuomo in the Democratic primary, talking about Facebook,
Twitter, etc. and their responsibility for what Trump did. Her point was that
is their logarithms that are set up to bring to people, the kinds of content in
which they're interested. That's how ads are displayed. You make the content as
extreme as possible in order to attract their attention. So the result is that
the population is sorted into groups, according to political persuasion and
prejudice. This is how Trump's supporters are encouraged. If you want to stop
this kind of thing, you regulate these tech companies as public utilities. You
take away the profit motive. Everyone pays a small monthly fee to use them and
no advertising is allowed so there's no reason to use those logarithms.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2021 3:33 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>; Matthew <mcblack@xxxxxxxxx>; Dylan Ford
<dylanjamesford@xxxxxxxxx>; delores selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' Tells Only Half
the Story
A thought provoking article well worth reading.
"How do you wake up from the matrix when you don't know you're in the matrix?"
Carl, Dad, Grandpa
On 1/14/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' Tells Only Half the Story January 14,
2021 Social media and the AI behind it are among the multiple crises
we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory,
writes Jonathan Cook.
(FlashBuddy on Pixabay)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
If you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on right now -
the "Why is the world turning to shit?" thought - you may find
Netflix's new documentary "The Social Dilemma" a good starting point
for clarifying your thinking. I say "starting point" because, as we
shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its
analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is
good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently
face - epitomized both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its
ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities.
The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of
old wine in new bottles. This isn't the Generation Z equivalent of
parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play
outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for
Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on
who we are, not just what we think.
According to "The Social Dilemma," we are fast reaching a kind of
human "event horizon," with our societies standing on the brink of
collapse. We face what several interviewees term an "existential
threat" from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are
rapidly developing.
I don't think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are
right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the
right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.
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Like many documentaries of this kind, "The Social Dilemma" is deeply
tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most
cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior
software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their
once-cherished creations - Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the
roll call) - have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein's monsters.
That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent
the "Like" button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood
the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love
like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our
insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up
rates of suicide among teenage girls.
If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure,
disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors.
Children as Guinea Pigs
Although not flagged as such, "The Social Dilemma" divides into three
chapters.
The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar
with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our
psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main
guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the
first generation who spent their formative years with Facebook and
MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a
world without social media at its forefront.
The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children
are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the
packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold
their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.
Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control
of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world's
greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and
ours - the sense of who we are - is now in the hands of algorithms
that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial
intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going
to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it's
going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.
Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality,
explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really
selling:
"It's the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour
and perception - that is the product." That is also how these
corporations make their money, by "changing what you do, what you think, who you
are."
They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business -
predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are
more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you.
To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast
quantities of data on each of us - what is sometimes called
"surveillance capitalism."
"Our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings can be plundered by
advertisers."
And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another
implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximize their
predictions is this: As well as processing lots of data on us, they
must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our
eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our
emotions - our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings - can be more
easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.
These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other
corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures,
notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school.
Those markets "have made the internet companies the richest companies
in the history of humanity."
Flat Earthers & Pizzagate
The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo
chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense
of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathize
and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes,
chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximize
our attention for advertisers' products to generate greater profits
for the internet giants.
Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative
platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim.
Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the
algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly
prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.
And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: "The truth
is boring." Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun.
People prefer to share what's exciting, what's novel, what's
unexpected, what's shocking. "It's a disinformation-for-profit model,"
as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false
information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than
true information.
And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech
companies - a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore
- our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our
thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political
discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before.
This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our
societies are riven by increasing polarization and conflict, and feel
more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension -
from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the
Black Lives Matter protests - are the result of social media's harmful
influence.
Proponents of Pizzagate connected this restaurant to a fictitious
child sex ring. (Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading
misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is
false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our
yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true - or Mark
Zuckerberg, or even "experts." It may be a while since doctors were
telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were
told only a few years ago that opiates would help them - until an
opiate addiction crisis erupted across the U.S.
This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by
one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks,
the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used
simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google's former design
ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able
to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That,
of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of
most of Silicon Valley's leading lights.
(Twitter)
But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just
satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also
fueled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and
offered tools to help us do that.
Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share
scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We
can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately
kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim
cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge
the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as
little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.
The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned
former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark
Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a U.S. army private like Chelsea
Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a
national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the
way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.
Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian
Assange to set up a site, WikiLeaks, that offered us a window on the
real political world - a window through we could see our leaders
behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same
leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on
trial.
Small Window on Reality
"The Social Dilemma" ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of
so-called fake news. It dramatizes a scene suggesting that only those
sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking
to the street to protest - and when they do, the film hints, it will
not end well for them.
Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination
are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our
leaders are really doing - whether they are committing crimes against
others or against us - is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a
vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviors
"The Social Dilemma" is concerned about, not least our destruction of
the planet's life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee's
final comment, the film leaves untouched).
"Chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain
insights into a reality that was obscured before."
Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the
real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their
understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world
mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media
corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an
opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.
The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations
are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less
manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they
are rapidly refining are being used - under the rubric of "fake news"
- to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism,
in dissident ideas.
Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing
the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After
all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business
of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in
a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.
Much of our current social polarization and conflict is not, as "The
Social Dilemma" suggests, between those influenced by social media's "fake news"
and those influenced by corporate media's "real news." It is between,
on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical
thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those
trapped in the old media model or those who -unable to think
critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media -have been
easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.
Mental Black Boxes
The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating
exactly what that nub is. That is because "The Social Dilemma" cannot
properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary
conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that
funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded
itself.
For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the "existential
threat" we face as a species, "The Social Dilemma" is strangely quiet
about what needs to change - aside from limiting our kids' exposure to YouTube
and Facebook.
It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.
(Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Here I want to backtrack a little. The film's first chapter makes it
sound as though social media's rewiring of our brains to sell us
advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our
society's growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an
individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very
obviously neither proposition is true.
Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways
for at least a century. And social atomization - individualism,
selfishness and consumerism - have been a feature of Western life for at least
as long.
These aren't new phenomena. It's just that these long-term, negative
aspects of Western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly
unstoppable rate.
We've been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious
to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal
with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists
back in the 1970s.
The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet - destroying
forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction,
polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a
climate crisis - have been increasingly evident since our societies
turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in
the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems
highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided
that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to
turn a quick buck.
It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon.
But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global
economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more
importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.
There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an
ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries' duration, by a tiny
and ever more fabulously wealthy elite to further enrich themselves
and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.
There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff
points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically
wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching
the human "event horizon" these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear,
one where our societies, our economies, the planet's life-support
systems are all on the brink of collapse together.
The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it
has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a
mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any
other way of organizing our lives, any other future than the one we
are destined for at the moment.
That ideology's name is capitalism.
Waking up from the Matrix
Global Climate Strike in London, March 15, 2019. (Gary Knight, Flickr)
Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we
can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it
has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism's current,
all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the
"civilized," industrialized West decided its mission was to conquer
and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that
fetishized money and turned people into objects to be exploited.
A few of the participants in "The Social Dilemma" allude to this in
the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in
expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn
from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world
has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes,
preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they,
like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the
best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to
let a film like this one reach a mass audience.
Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a
movie
allusion: "How do you wake up from the matrix when you don't know
you're in the matrix?" Later, he observes: "What I see is a bunch of
people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive,
shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else."
Although still framed in Harris' mind as a specific critique of social
media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all
corporations, and of the ideological system - capitalism - that
empowers all these corporations.
Another interviewee notes: "I don't think these guys [the tech giants]
set out to be evil, it's just the business model."
He is right. But "evilness" - the psychopathic pursuit of profit above
all other values - is the business model for all corporations, not
just the digital ones.
The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is
Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He
eloquently
observes:
"We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead
than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive.
For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go
unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill
whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the
ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it
is going to leave a worse world for future generations."
This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs.
As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish
interest is going to produce the best result. . What's frightening -
and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a
civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place - is
to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can
be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending
time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending our
time living our life in a rich way."
Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed "flawed theory" is capitalism.
The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion -
that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an "existential
threat" - because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest
corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook.
These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts
with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook
and YouTube as little more than places to exchange news with friends
or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen
up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in
human history.
Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their
experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their
corporate sector. They understand the "existential threat" posed by
Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential
threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman
Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.
The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly,
psychopathic face shielded by the mask of social media's affability.
But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to
grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive
social media giants into our lives.
