I am so horrified by this. The more I think about it the more sick I get. It is - intentionally or not - evil.
They've been trying to hack us with algorithms. They've been experimenting, without any oversight or knowledge, with human behavior on a scale grander than anyone has ever seen. They've been using propaganda and priming on us all to bring about strange and grotesque outcomes.
Silicon Valley trust fundies didn't just let a genocide happen in Myanmar, then. They just wanted to see what would happen. Because who gives a shit about Myanmar except to go on a meditation retreat, right? newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/m…
All these strange crowd mentalities that have come up - I have very strong synesthesia and it has affected my life over the years in many ways, all positive. I suspected that it affected the way I learn and write, so when I was at UC San Diego, that's what I studied - cogsci
I ended up studying linguistics and learning about priming and its powers. blog.motivemetrics.com/What-is-Primin…
This is a very powerful technique on its own, but more so when you are talking to peers and family and they unintentionally help out, because that's your community talking. So we have hordes of people who have been primed with dark ads and carefully chosen posts to do... what?
To explain why I am so horrified by this, I'll give an example. Imagine you are deeply depressed and can't get out of bed. But you crave community, so you get on Facebook. The algorithms have already picked up that you're depressed with the sophisticated psychographic modeling
that Cambridge Analytica was bragging about. So the algorithms decide to show you only the shittiest, most depressing updates that all your friends post, because eNgAgEmEnT. Maybe you're seeing dark ads too, who knows? Life seems shitty and horrible and it spirals into suicide.
But it's not just CA, it's the entire company. They're hacking people. And on a grander scale you have Myanmar. Now it seems to me that it was deliberate - that they just wanted to see what would happen. That's why they didn't bother to do anything about it when I brought it up.
And then you get this. Genocide. How many of these? newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/m…
It's advertising, but worse. It's consumerism, but worse. It's viral in the sense that it's making people sick. The science is all there and it's been exploited by people with no sense of history or ethics.
There are so many factors that have gone into this. This could never have happened without the degradation of human sciences, for example. Or the near death of journalism in the United States and elsewhere.
Consumerism was thought up by Edward Bernays to keep crowds controlled. Unfettered democracy is dangerous - if you're an authoritarian in power. It's messy. It's bloody. Consumerism keeps us all too busy to riot. apa.org/monitor/2009/1…
This is "peacetime propaganda," as public relations were originally called, at a previously unknown scale. We fed our entire personalities into this for the sake of human connection in the digital age, and our personalities have now been chopped up bit by bit and fed back to us.
For more,
Facebook provided internet to developing countries. Why? What has been going on in countries that have no functioning press oversight? What sort of things have happened under the auspices of free internet in so-called "shithole countries?"
And it's so easy to see how this happened as well. You get these tech bros, totally disconnected from reality, living in their little walled communities far away from the madding crowd, nodding sagely at one another about "engagement" and "algorithms" while people are murdered.
What do they care what might happen in, say, Cameroon? Gotta do your little "experiments" techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/int… 
Engagement. cfr.org/blog/cameroons…
Engagement. hrw.org/blog-feed/keny…
Engagement. fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/bsr-fa…
None of this is anything new. It is just all being done on a huge, grand level. To hack people, to hack societies. There's not even an end game, I bet - it's just to see what would happen, to see how one algorithm change can result in massive riots somewhere in the world.
I don't even have a witty quip to wind this up with. I'm utterly shocked and horrified. I feel like democracy is a butterfly that social media deliberately pulled the wings off of - because they could. But they didn't know that "hacking people" isn't genius, evil or otherwise
It's just the same sick shit that the corrupt have used for centuries to control crowds while they go out of their way to discredit expertise in ethics & history & sociology & anthropology, because that's an irritating fetter on this grand experiment.
And it's not just Facebook.
And it's not just Facebook.
My "suicide" example, by the way, was real. It wasn't just a thing I thought up. nytimes.com/2014/06/30/tec…
This is why reality feels so bent out of shape, because it has been, first incrementally to sell us things then all at once to sell entire bills of goods. Hacking humans.
We need to all get out of this. We need to take back social media. It belongs to the people now.
We need to all get out of this. We need to take back social media. It belongs to the people now.
If you want an example of the contempt the tech world feels for "the masses," look no farther than the housing situation in the Bay Area and their reactions to it.
