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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jaron Lanier
Read between
September 23, 2022 - March 5, 2023
B Tech companies spy on you, Butting into your life.
C Cramming experiences down your throat.
D Directing lives through ubiquitous behavior modification.
E Earning money by letting some people, often nasty ones, secretly modify the behaviors of other people.
F Fake people have no reason to tell the truth.
fake people are manufactured in a new underworld.
The tech companies all do battle with fake accounts, but they also benefit from them.
Massive fake social activities turn out to influence real people. They indirectly create a genuine social reality, which means they make money.
the craziest conspiracy theories often start on BUMMER, amplified by artificial people, before they appear in hyperpartisan legacy media.
People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed.
Online, we often have little or no ability to know or influence the context in which our expression will be understood.
you don’t know the context in which you are expressing anything and you have no reliable way of knowing how it will be presented to someone else.
To become a number is to be explicitly subservient to a system.
Feedback is a good thing, but overemphasizing immediate feedback within an artificially limited online environment leads to ridiculous outcomes.7
Journalists have successfully held themselves to higher standards than social media influencers, but they have also paid a price.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS DESTROYING YOUR CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY
Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society.
algorithms intrinsically gravitate toward corralling people into bubbles,
The ability to theorize about what someone else experiences as part of understanding that person is called having a theory of mind.
Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it’s a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It’s why stories exist.
world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation.
Facebook researchers have practically bragged9 that they could make people unhappy without the people realizing why.10
their products can do real harm.
setting of unreasonable standards for beauty or social status, for instance, or vulnerability to trolls.
makes me feel judged within an unfair and degrading competition, and to no higher purpose.
The other level of judgment is based on mathematical correlations that people might not ever see or be able to interpret.
negative emotions are more readily accessible and more profitable BUMMER magnets for people than positive ones.
More and more people rely on the gig economy, which makes it hard to plan one’s life.
the level of risk in their financial lives seems to never decline, no matter how much they’ve achieved.
The movement to make software free was founded on an honest mistake.
the transparency that must underlie democracy, literacy, and decency was thought to be incompatible with any business model but free.
They’d enter a gig economy instead of a royalty economy.
Ultimately, only one method of reconciliation was identified: the advertising business model.
What we call AI should never be understood as an alternative to people, but instead as a mislabeled new channel of value between real people.
I think companies should get rich if they make things people want, but I don’t think you should be made less and less secure as part of the bargain.
When social media companies are paid directly by users instead of by hidden third parties, then they will serve those users.
Gaming should be turning into the new way we learn and talk about complicated issues.
Gamergate became a feeder and model for the alt-right.
BUMMER makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry
It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game.
BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression.
You’re probably becoming more of an asshole, but you’re also probably sadder;
Your ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted.
when the whole society is being manipulated in a coordinated way, we must seek a grander explanatory framework.
BUMMER intrinsically enacts a structural, rather than an ontological, change in the nature of free will.
less a set of technologies than it was a business plan that spewed perverse incentives.
The third argument is about becoming an asshole. Remember that the idea is not that you become an asshole to everyone all the time, but that your Solitary/Pack switch is set to Pack.
Argument Four was about undermining truth, so it’s a biggie from a spiritual point of view.
Religions generally are connected with specific truth claims,
BUMMER must own you in order to own anything at all.
