More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.
The power of what other people think has proven to be intense enough to modify the behavior of subjects
prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.
problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.
incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behavior.
correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are.
Underlying incentives tend to overpower policies.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people,
want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force.
The Pack setting of the switch makes you pay so much attention to your peers and enemies in the world of packs that you can become blind to what’s happening right in front of your face.
Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.
collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.
motivation to do anything aside from attention-getting or seeking other purely psychological rewards is the key.
Social media mashes up meaning. Whatever you say will be contextualized
Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes
You and they can’t build unmolested commonality unless the phones are put away.
most people can only make time to see what’s placed in front of them by algorithmic feeds.
Not only is your worldview distorted, but you have less awareness of other people’s worldviews.
When you can only see how someone else behaves, but not the experiences that influenced their behavior, it becomes harder to have a theory of mind about that person.
setting of unreasonable standards for beauty or social status,
There are a million BUMMER games going on all the time, and you’re a loser at almost all of them, because you’re competing with the whole planet.
statistically driven enterprise adapted continuously in order to optimize its performance.
These questions might all look different at first, but on closer inspection they are all versions of the same question: What is a person?
