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People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed.
Some of us can briefly get away with assuming that people will be healthy without vaccinations, as if health were the natural state of affairs.
Media forms that promote truth are essential for survival, but the dominant media of our age do no such thing.
What you say isn’t meaningful without context.
The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore.
You and they can’t build unmolested commonality unless the phones are put away.
You are drawn into a corral with other people who can be maximally engaged along with you as a group.
BUMMER algorithms intrinsically gravitate toward corralling people into bubbles, because to engage a group is more effective and economical than to up engagement one person at a time.
I fear the subtle algorithmic tuning of feeds more than I fear blatant dark ads. It used to be impossible to send customized messages to millions of people instantly. It used to be impossible to test and design multitudes of customized messages, based on detailed observation and feedback from unknowing people who are kept under constant surveillance.
This is an epochal development. The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa.
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.
Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia.
What bums me out is not some particular surface pattern—like seeing everyone else misrepresent their lives as being more wealthy, happy, and trouble-free than they are—but instead it’s the core BUMMER system. Being addicted and manipulated makes me feel bad, but there’s more to it than that. BUMMER makes me feel judged within an unfair and degrading competition, and to no higher purpose.
But to me it’s not even about the programs, however over-worshipped they might be, but about the power relationships that arise because people accept and implicitly respect the programs.
The inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgment; that is what makes me unhappy. How can you have self-esteem when that’s not the kind of esteem that matters most anymore?
How can you find happiness without authentic self-esteem? How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?
They are hooked because of provoked natural vigilance.
Therefore, the transparency that must underlie democracy, literacy, and decency was thought to be incompatible with any business model but free.
Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels.
Ultimately, only one method of reconciliation was identified: the advertising business model. Advertising would allow search to be free, music to be free, and news to be free.
Advertising would become the dominant business in the information era.
But as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising inevitably morphed into mass behavior modification.
As often happens with people, we forgot that we made a choice. Now we feel helpless. But the choice remains, and we can remake it.
We have enshrined the belief that the only way to finance a connection between two people is through a third person who is paying to manipulate them.
But there isn’t some self-sufficient digital brain behind the scenes that delivers these translations.
Everyone is feeding BUMMER data because they’re addicted and trapped by network effects, as described in the first argument.
Democracy was confused with a thin faith that online collective dynamics would lead to a better world. A self-organized revolution could do no wrong. Here, we thought, was the realization of our faith in networks.
What social media did at that time, and what it always does, is create illusions: that you can improve society by wishes alone; that the sanest people will be favored in cutting contests; and that somehow material well-being will just take care of itself. What actually happens, always, is that the illusions fall apart when it is too late, and the world is inherited by the crudest, most selfish, and least informed people.
A widespread phenomenon of networked nihilistic terror exploded.7 Young people were watching the most awful, sadistic videos, channeled to them by Silicon Valley companies, and the dynamic was like porn. Kids became addicted to atrocity.
Many of those developers were female.
Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention. They have such a hold on so much of so many people’s attention for so much of each day that they are gatekeepers to brains.
They’re becoming the existential mafia.
Black activists and sympathizers were carefully cataloged and studied.
What made them shift to be more targetable by behavior modification messages over time?
Meanwhile, automatically, black activism was tested for its ability to preoccupy, annoy, even transfix other populations, who themselves were then automatically cataloged, prodded, and studied.
The Russian purpose was apparently to irritate black activists enough to lower enthusiasm for voting for Hillary. To suppress the vote, statistically.
All we can surmise is that a statistically driven enterprise adapted continuously in order to optimize its performance.
At the end of the day, BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression.
Behavior-modification cages can only manipulate one creature at a time, but when the whole society is being manipulated in a coordinated way, we must seek a grander explanatory framework. There aren’t many choices. The clearest one is probably religion.
The ritual of engaging with BUMMER initially appears to be a funeral for free will.
Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.
You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth.
The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common.
The purpose of life, according to BUMMER, is to optimize.
This is not just metaphysics, but metaphysical imperialism.
The constant surveillance and testing of behavior modification in multitudes of humans is supposedly gathering data that will evolve into the intelligence of future AIs.
The singularity is the BUMMER religion’s answer to the evangelical Christian Rapture.
Who is to say what counts as intelligence in a program?
I am conscious. I have faith that you are also conscious. We each experience
Experience is a mystery, deeper than other mysteries, because we know of no way to break it into parts to study it.
