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Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical.
Yes, I am suggesting that you might be turning, just a little, into a well-trained dog, or something less pleasant, like a lab rat or a robot.
It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.…
addictive and manipulative network services.
The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification.
Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.
Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.
it’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback.
The allure of glitchy feedback is probably what draws a lot of people into crummy “codependent” relationships in which they aren’t treated well.
Adaptive systems often include such a leaping mechanism. An example is the occurrence of useful mutations in natural evolution,
The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments;
The pioneers of the online exploitation of this intersection of math and the human brain were not the social media companies, but the creators of digital gambling machines like video poker, and then of
online gambling sites.
reward or punishment more effective at changing people?
Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.
The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones. Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.
“empires of behavior modification for rent.”
The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results.
Digital networks genuinely deliver value to us. They allow for great efficiencies and convenience.
Effects of this kind are called network effects or lock-ins.
Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don’t have free will. Once again, this result isn’t total but statistical. You become more like a zombie, more of the time, than you otherwise would be.
When mutual behavior modification gets good, it might be part of what we talk about when we talk about love.
So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.
The vast majority of that money comes from parties who are seeking to change your behavior, and who believe they are getting results.
Therefore, there are likely to be actors manipulating us—manipulating you—who have not been revealed. To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.
The problem occurs when all the phenomena I’ve just described are driven by a business model in which the incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behavior.
Your specific behavior change has been turned into a product.
deleterious business model,
“Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”?
Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behavior manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fueled negative behavioral feedback.
Trump, Milo et al
the main—or often the only—reward that’s available is attention.
Ordinary users can gain only fake power and wealth, not real power or wealth. So mind games become dominant.
the biggest assholes get the most attention.
Like all well-managed theories, they improve over time through adaptive feedback.
Customized feeds become optimized to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realize how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system.
From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimize.
The mass behavior modification machine is rented out to make money.
Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on BUMMER.
If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying happens to be what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means that bad actors are amplified.
Underlying incentives tend to overpower policies.
BUMMER pioneers like Google and Facebook have avidly chased bad actors, fakers, and unsanctioned manipulators, and the result has been the rise of technically accomplished, underground cyber mafias, sometimes working for unfriendly states.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes.
Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.
The only constant basis of friendship is shared antagonism toward other packs.
More options means more chances to not be a troll.
Therefore, situations in which you are separated from immediate contact with larger reality, in which social interactions become preeminent, will turn your inner switch to Pack.
What we need is anything that’s real beyond social pretensions that people can focus on instead of becoming assholes.
Massive fake social activities turn out to influence real people.
What is different in recent years is that many of us no longer directly interrogate the jar of jelly beans.
In our BUMMER era, the information reaching people is the result of how manipulative advertisers and power-mad tech companies intersect with crazed, engineered status competitions.
