Phenomenally wise. So good I clicked on the Share option for the first time, then I realized it gave me the option of picking all the social platforms where folks would never read it. LOL! I look forward to reading the next part.
Do you think it is possible to create a means of communication at scale without fragmentation, or would such a platform simply be not competitive against the established new media, so that we remain stuck at wholesome communication person to person, i.e. at low scale? As an aside, by this point in time I think it is fair to talk about the established new media, even if that seems like a contradiction in terms.
Possible, yes. But it wouldn't be nearly as sticky as Twitter and the rest of social media, so it would fail with the current market incentives. It would be some sort of parallel to a “fast food” restaurant that sold organic, healthy, delicious food that was prepared the same way that a loving home cook prepared. It simply couldn't do it fast enough or cheap enough and it wouldn't last a month.
I doubt this is objectively true. Confirmation bias is powerful. I took several hours of screen recordings the last time I was studying this and found my own impressions to be mostly false, tainted by confirmation bias.
But if it were to be *objectively true*, then you are likely in an algorithmic territory meant for children or elderly people, designed to make money for the platform by creating stickiness through meeting baseline emotional needs for sweetness and light.
I wrote about this -- less beautifully, though -- in my one of my first Substack posts, using the double-slit experiment as a metaphor. That humans are waves, and when we interact in person, we interact as waves, shifting in interaction, mirror neurons activated, energies meeting and engaging and exchanging. When we post online, in whatever form, we collapse our wave into a particle -- a static fragment of ourselves captured in time, never completely authentic because of our awareness of the observer(s). When we communicate in particles, we become more particle-like ourselves. More narcissistic, more sub-clinically autistic.
Since my appearance on Substack roughly one year ago, I have longed for a non-curated feed, one that is not subjected to algorithmic manipulation. Thanks to this article I now understand why it will never be allowed to happen.
Correct. It will never happen. BTW, I couldn’t quite fit it into this one — I may make it a separate article at some point — but your smartphone, Alexa, and other devices of that nature are eavesdropping. If you talk to Mrs. McGirt about something but do not google it or otherwise look online about it, then get ads related to that thing — that’s not your imagination. You’re not crazy. Smart devices are designed to do that, and they do it. The only way to escape it entirely is to not have any smart devices at all, which is not feasible for most people. It certainly isn’t for me, as my hearing aids run off my smartphone, and I’m basically unable to navigate without GPS. Josh is going to help me fix the latter, and I will then be able to leave my phone home sometimes, as long as I’m in situations where I don’t need the various settings (like restaurant vs therapy, which has a white noise machine to deal with, vs the outdoors with traffic, vs music, etc.).
I think they're also messing with our subconscious in really strange ways, so we see an ad for something we've just thought about pop up in our feeds. I studied advertising and marketing in college, and this is so invasive, so violating, and so wrong - and yet, it appears to be actually happening.
I deleted my old Twitter account because I was trolling big time.
Later I made a new one, and only followed a select few news sources and people. There I keep up with security threats across the world and here, guntubers, and a few government officials.
On the new profile I have a whopping two followers that are bots.
Then I stay in the following tab instead of the unhinged For You tab.
Facebook’s feed is getting stupid with the pages I don’t follow and advertisements.
This is the best that you can do. But just as I am being manipulated despite not having tweeted in three years, as in this essay’s example, there is an algorithm for manipulating you as well. Just know that and keep your participation minimal. It’s all you can do beyond pulling the plug entirely.
People on social media need to realize they’re messing with ADDICTION. Get off it, cold turkey. Get a life in the Real World, for the sake of your mental health, and for the sake of civilization. Social media is manipulating you into fixations, grievances, derangements, and a slew of other mentally-unhealthy mindsets. You don’t need this! Go for a walk in nature; go out to lunch with a real friend; read an inspiring book!
Weirdly enough, previous generations had their versions of this. During the 1950s, many American women got themselves caught up in a ‘need’ to be perfect. You had to be a perfect wife and mother, with a perfectly clean and organized house, and look beautiful at all times. It was a disaster if a neighbor caught a glimpse of you in hair curlers - the shame! Society became overly-judgmental, with an overarching fear of “what would the neighbors say!” This lead everyone to hide aspects of their lives, their ‘skeletons in the closet’. Just like people today on social media, who won’t show themselves online without Instagram digital filters, 1950s society would pretend to be someone other than who they actually were. It was hypocritical and mentally unhealthy.
Young people today need to find a balance and ‘realness’ to their lives. Social media is manipulating and disrupting you - resist it! You can be the revolutionaries who chuck it and build a healthy, real world!
Excellent essay packed with great observations and some interesting analysis. I really wish Al Gore and his rithms (😆) would leave us all alone, but your point about them increasing engagement and time spent on the app or service makes total sense. I will stay away, as previously noted and thank you for the warnings
Then there is this from the WSJ (hard pass): “Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past two weeks painting a picture of a future where people spend their days talking to Al friends, venting to Al therapists and asking Al sales reps about stuff they're trying to buy.”
This is so interesting to me. I have never had a social media account and I didn’t really understand how it works. I got a substack subscription for an online magazine back in September. Good and bad so far. During the run up to the election and around the first of the year it was really upsetting to me and I almost cancelled, with the burning cyber truck and the mysterious fog and social unrest that was hitting my feed all the time. I still don’t go to the politics tab it’s such a display of ugliness. But I found you and so many brilliant minds here that I am now enjoying it. I have to look at it more as entertainment, as an observer to keep me from getting sucked into the doom vortex. But I do interact with the serious people and that is valuable to me.
In re-reading your post, something just clicked, for me anyway, when you mentioned the Twitter/X "feed." Since I've never used either iteration of the program/service, I didn't realize that it's a "push" service: it sends you stuff you never specifically asked for.
Exactly the same behavior that soured me on YouTube. I don't want to be "fed." I prefer going out and looking for it myself. I don't think you're old enough to remember the ad with the line "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!" but that's the feeling I got with YouTube. At least with Substack we get to choose whose work we're going to subscribe to, and usually with at least a few free looks.
So the algorithm selects items to "feed" you, and you begin to grow in the direction they choose. That whole idea leaves me cold. No wonder so many now have a love/hate relationship going with social media. Which I have often dubbed as the A-social media intuitively; now I know more clearly why. Thank you.
This is why you must register to use any of it (though they occasionally leave a non registered option with intolerable amounts of ads or some such). So they can build a profile and start training you.
Just a short follow-up. I realized how YouTube was working when I accessed it on a different computer with a "new" account name, and found something completely different from what I was getting on my other computer.
For various reasons, I have always had two computers going at once: one new, one older. And at least three accounts on each one: one for admin, one for regular email etc. and one for photos and music, my other interests. Keeps me busy, but also likely sane.
I just remembered something , lol it gets worse as you get older. Maybe 20 years ago I watched a TED talk about internet filter bubbles. The speaker was explaining how information was tailored for you by some system, I hadn’t heard of an algorithm back then but I guess that is what he was saying. It creeped me out when I heard that because it seemed like some form of mind control. Basically he was saying that it could selectively feed you biased information to skew your perception. I had no idea how sophisticated it would become.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen in our current world if the internet and all social media became corrupted, went down and didn't come back online. While we waited for it to be reconstituted, would / could the current 'us' revert to an analog algorithm-free version of communication and relationship of 50+ years ago? Or are there just some features of human nature that would still leave us vulnerable to malignant narcism, reliance on hairbrained ideologies and cults of personality... anyway?
A random comment in a Racket News live chat mentioned Fyodor Dostoevsky 1860s work of fiction, Demons (sometimes referred to as The Possessed) as a cautionary tale. I downloaded the audiobook. It appears I'm not the only one wondering. Cold comfort that the man who spent time in a gulag with only a bible to read got there long ago. I wonder what the algorithm will 'feed' me now that I've copied the links below?
This is ... brilliant. When I read the first part, amazing btw, I thought, "Okay, buckling up. This is going to be quite a ride. And really good." And then this appeared. Didn't think it was possible, but you one-upped your part 1.
I could say quite a bit about my attempts to persuade people that social media is "programming" them to act, react, think, and believe what/how/why they do, but the message is generally met with disinterest or incredulity. *I* know the seemingly objective but evil umbrella under which "social media engagement" crouches is being purposefully used to screw with me. So many people can't - don't want to think about? - comprehend that. Even knowing the mind-screw that social media platforms visit upon me, I let myself get dragged into the pit over outdoor roaming house cats. I don't suffer fools easily, and the "woman" who engaged me thought she could out-snark and out-snipe me. At a certain point I caught myself thinking, "Why the hell am I wasting my energy on this???" And I ignored the response, put the phone down, and went outside to work in my yard.
Before the cats, it was the stabbing/killing of the white youth by the black youth - a short hop and skip from my dwelling. Social media - PEOPLE - went insane in the immediate aftermath of that. And I'm over here thinking, "Here we go. Let's watch the stupid people get manipulated over this." And they were. And did. And are. And are completely incapable of recognizing it. I don't even want to think about the trial.
But, I've meandered off into the weeds; back to the brilliance that is unfolding via your cursor. I am very much looking forward to your next installment. I've shared 1 and 2 with multiple people and am going to share it with more. I don't think human beings should have ever been trusted with the "sword of social media". But here we are. We need more voices like yours to maybe pull us back out of the abyss - for I believe we've already gone over the edge. I fear the continued growth of the dank pit that is being dug, the black hole that will become the world my children and grandchildren inhabit. 😔
MEDIA - Most Effective Devil In America ~maj toure
Phenomenally wise. So good I clicked on the Share option for the first time, then I realized it gave me the option of picking all the social platforms where folks would never read it. LOL! I look forward to reading the next part.
Thank you!
Do you think it is possible to create a means of communication at scale without fragmentation, or would such a platform simply be not competitive against the established new media, so that we remain stuck at wholesome communication person to person, i.e. at low scale? As an aside, by this point in time I think it is fair to talk about the established new media, even if that seems like a contradiction in terms.
Possible, yes. But it wouldn't be nearly as sticky as Twitter and the rest of social media, so it would fail with the current market incentives. It would be some sort of parallel to a “fast food” restaurant that sold organic, healthy, delicious food that was prepared the same way that a loving home cook prepared. It simply couldn't do it fast enough or cheap enough and it wouldn't last a month.
So what does it say about me that most of my feed is funny or heartwarming pics of cats and dogs?
I doubt this is objectively true. Confirmation bias is powerful. I took several hours of screen recordings the last time I was studying this and found my own impressions to be mostly false, tainted by confirmation bias.
But if it were to be *objectively true*, then you are likely in an algorithmic territory meant for children or elderly people, designed to make money for the platform by creating stickiness through meeting baseline emotional needs for sweetness and light.
I wrote about this -- less beautifully, though -- in my one of my first Substack posts, using the double-slit experiment as a metaphor. That humans are waves, and when we interact in person, we interact as waves, shifting in interaction, mirror neurons activated, energies meeting and engaging and exchanging. When we post online, in whatever form, we collapse our wave into a particle -- a static fragment of ourselves captured in time, never completely authentic because of our awareness of the observer(s). When we communicate in particles, we become more particle-like ourselves. More narcissistic, more sub-clinically autistic.
That's an excellent metaphor for the phenomenon!
I like this.
Since my appearance on Substack roughly one year ago, I have longed for a non-curated feed, one that is not subjected to algorithmic manipulation. Thanks to this article I now understand why it will never be allowed to happen.
Thanks for an eye opening article.
Correct. It will never happen. BTW, I couldn’t quite fit it into this one — I may make it a separate article at some point — but your smartphone, Alexa, and other devices of that nature are eavesdropping. If you talk to Mrs. McGirt about something but do not google it or otherwise look online about it, then get ads related to that thing — that’s not your imagination. You’re not crazy. Smart devices are designed to do that, and they do it. The only way to escape it entirely is to not have any smart devices at all, which is not feasible for most people. It certainly isn’t for me, as my hearing aids run off my smartphone, and I’m basically unable to navigate without GPS. Josh is going to help me fix the latter, and I will then be able to leave my phone home sometimes, as long as I’m in situations where I don’t need the various settings (like restaurant vs therapy, which has a white noise machine to deal with, vs the outdoors with traffic, vs music, etc.).
I think they're also messing with our subconscious in really strange ways, so we see an ad for something we've just thought about pop up in our feeds. I studied advertising and marketing in college, and this is so invasive, so violating, and so wrong - and yet, it appears to be actually happening.
The curated feed makes me insanely angry. I would spend a zillion more hours on Substack if it wasn't so unbelievably transparent.
I deleted my old Twitter account because I was trolling big time.
Later I made a new one, and only followed a select few news sources and people. There I keep up with security threats across the world and here, guntubers, and a few government officials.
On the new profile I have a whopping two followers that are bots.
Then I stay in the following tab instead of the unhinged For You tab.
Facebook’s feed is getting stupid with the pages I don’t follow and advertisements.
This is the best that you can do. But just as I am being manipulated despite not having tweeted in three years, as in this essay’s example, there is an algorithm for manipulating you as well. Just know that and keep your participation minimal. It’s all you can do beyond pulling the plug entirely.
Yeah, if I focus to much on that then I can really start to see the world as a scary place. A fear feed.
People on social media need to realize they’re messing with ADDICTION. Get off it, cold turkey. Get a life in the Real World, for the sake of your mental health, and for the sake of civilization. Social media is manipulating you into fixations, grievances, derangements, and a slew of other mentally-unhealthy mindsets. You don’t need this! Go for a walk in nature; go out to lunch with a real friend; read an inspiring book!
Weirdly enough, previous generations had their versions of this. During the 1950s, many American women got themselves caught up in a ‘need’ to be perfect. You had to be a perfect wife and mother, with a perfectly clean and organized house, and look beautiful at all times. It was a disaster if a neighbor caught a glimpse of you in hair curlers - the shame! Society became overly-judgmental, with an overarching fear of “what would the neighbors say!” This lead everyone to hide aspects of their lives, their ‘skeletons in the closet’. Just like people today on social media, who won’t show themselves online without Instagram digital filters, 1950s society would pretend to be someone other than who they actually were. It was hypocritical and mentally unhealthy.
Young people today need to find a balance and ‘realness’ to their lives. Social media is manipulating and disrupting you - resist it! You can be the revolutionaries who chuck it and build a healthy, real world!
Great post. Thank you 🙏
Old School Dude here.
Don't do Twitter or Instagram etc. Thought they were stupid and way to much to do about nothing from folks with way to much time on their hands.
However, I am aware that we are constantly being manipulated all the time and that it isn't just 'Social Media'.
Excellent essay packed with great observations and some interesting analysis. I really wish Al Gore and his rithms (😆) would leave us all alone, but your point about them increasing engagement and time spent on the app or service makes total sense. I will stay away, as previously noted and thank you for the warnings
Then there is this from the WSJ (hard pass): “Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past two weeks painting a picture of a future where people spend their days talking to Al friends, venting to Al therapists and asking Al sales reps about stuff they're trying to buy.”
This is so interesting to me. I have never had a social media account and I didn’t really understand how it works. I got a substack subscription for an online magazine back in September. Good and bad so far. During the run up to the election and around the first of the year it was really upsetting to me and I almost cancelled, with the burning cyber truck and the mysterious fog and social unrest that was hitting my feed all the time. I still don’t go to the politics tab it’s such a display of ugliness. But I found you and so many brilliant minds here that I am now enjoying it. I have to look at it more as entertainment, as an observer to keep me from getting sucked into the doom vortex. But I do interact with the serious people and that is valuable to me.
In re-reading your post, something just clicked, for me anyway, when you mentioned the Twitter/X "feed." Since I've never used either iteration of the program/service, I didn't realize that it's a "push" service: it sends you stuff you never specifically asked for.
Exactly the same behavior that soured me on YouTube. I don't want to be "fed." I prefer going out and looking for it myself. I don't think you're old enough to remember the ad with the line "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!" but that's the feeling I got with YouTube. At least with Substack we get to choose whose work we're going to subscribe to, and usually with at least a few free looks.
So the algorithm selects items to "feed" you, and you begin to grow in the direction they choose. That whole idea leaves me cold. No wonder so many now have a love/hate relationship going with social media. Which I have often dubbed as the A-social media intuitively; now I know more clearly why. Thank you.
This is why you must register to use any of it (though they occasionally leave a non registered option with intolerable amounts of ads or some such). So they can build a profile and start training you.
Just a short follow-up. I realized how YouTube was working when I accessed it on a different computer with a "new" account name, and found something completely different from what I was getting on my other computer.
For various reasons, I have always had two computers going at once: one new, one older. And at least three accounts on each one: one for admin, one for regular email etc. and one for photos and music, my other interests. Keeps me busy, but also likely sane.
I just remembered something , lol it gets worse as you get older. Maybe 20 years ago I watched a TED talk about internet filter bubbles. The speaker was explaining how information was tailored for you by some system, I hadn’t heard of an algorithm back then but I guess that is what he was saying. It creeped me out when I heard that because it seemed like some form of mind control. Basically he was saying that it could selectively feed you biased information to skew your perception. I had no idea how sophisticated it would become.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen in our current world if the internet and all social media became corrupted, went down and didn't come back online. While we waited for it to be reconstituted, would / could the current 'us' revert to an analog algorithm-free version of communication and relationship of 50+ years ago? Or are there just some features of human nature that would still leave us vulnerable to malignant narcism, reliance on hairbrained ideologies and cults of personality... anyway?
A random comment in a Racket News live chat mentioned Fyodor Dostoevsky 1860s work of fiction, Demons (sometimes referred to as The Possessed) as a cautionary tale. I downloaded the audiobook. It appears I'm not the only one wondering. Cold comfort that the man who spent time in a gulag with only a bible to read got there long ago. I wonder what the algorithm will 'feed' me now that I've copied the links below?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dostoevsky+demons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7huHnU7SBY
Anyway, an analysis or book review on this would be interesting real food for thought.
In the meantime, I'm going outside. California is crazy but the weather for today is wonderful.
Thank you. Please keep on keeping on.
An excellent discourse. I learned a lot. Thank you.
This is ... brilliant. When I read the first part, amazing btw, I thought, "Okay, buckling up. This is going to be quite a ride. And really good." And then this appeared. Didn't think it was possible, but you one-upped your part 1.
I could say quite a bit about my attempts to persuade people that social media is "programming" them to act, react, think, and believe what/how/why they do, but the message is generally met with disinterest or incredulity. *I* know the seemingly objective but evil umbrella under which "social media engagement" crouches is being purposefully used to screw with me. So many people can't - don't want to think about? - comprehend that. Even knowing the mind-screw that social media platforms visit upon me, I let myself get dragged into the pit over outdoor roaming house cats. I don't suffer fools easily, and the "woman" who engaged me thought she could out-snark and out-snipe me. At a certain point I caught myself thinking, "Why the hell am I wasting my energy on this???" And I ignored the response, put the phone down, and went outside to work in my yard.
Before the cats, it was the stabbing/killing of the white youth by the black youth - a short hop and skip from my dwelling. Social media - PEOPLE - went insane in the immediate aftermath of that. And I'm over here thinking, "Here we go. Let's watch the stupid people get manipulated over this." And they were. And did. And are. And are completely incapable of recognizing it. I don't even want to think about the trial.
But, I've meandered off into the weeds; back to the brilliance that is unfolding via your cursor. I am very much looking forward to your next installment. I've shared 1 and 2 with multiple people and am going to share it with more. I don't think human beings should have ever been trusted with the "sword of social media". But here we are. We need more voices like yours to maybe pull us back out of the abyss - for I believe we've already gone over the edge. I fear the continued growth of the dank pit that is being dug, the black hole that will become the world my children and grandchildren inhabit. 😔
MEDIA - Most Effective Devil In America ~maj toure