The Chaos Machine Quotes

“We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Facebook’s strategy, as he described it, was not so different from Napster’s. But rather than exploiting weaknesses in the music industry, it would do so for the human mind. “The thought process that went into building these applications,” Parker told the media conference, “was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” To do that, he said, “We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments.” He termed this the “social-validation feedback loop,” calling it “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He and Zuckerberg “understood this” from the beginning, he said, and “we did it anyway.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged, and so do you, at the same time, less innately engaging forms of content. Truth appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance, become more and more outmatched, like stars over Times Square.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement. As we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“The appearance of widespread anger, therefore, was an illusion. But human instincts to conform run deep. When people think something has become a matter of consensus, psychologists have found, they tend not only to go along, but to internalize that sentiment as their own.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“The changes were dramatic. People who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their life, and less anxious. The emotional change was equivalent to 25 to 40 percent of the effect of going to therapy—a stunning drop for a four-week break. Four in five said afterward that deactivating had been good for them. Facebook quitters also spent 15 percent less time consuming the news.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“We’ve reached a point where things that are popular and emotionally resonant are much more likely to be seen by you than things that are true,”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“One thing stuck out. Towns with higher-than-average Facebook use reliably experienced more attacks on refugees.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Social media, by bombarding users with fast-moving social stimuli, pushed them to rely on quick-twitch social intuition over deliberative reason. All people contain the capacity for both, as well as the potential for the former to overwhelm the latter, which is often how misinformation spreads. And platforms compound the effect by framing all news and information within high-stakes social contexts.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“YouTube was exploiting a cognitive loophole known as the illusory truth effect. We are, every hour of every day, bombarded with information. To cope, we take mental shortcuts to quickly decide what to accept or reject. One is familiarity; if a claim feels like something we’ve accepted as true before, it probably still is. It’s a gap in our mental defenses you could drive a truck through.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Silicon Valley dreams of destructive revolution, and platforms designed in ways that supercharge identity into a matter of totalizing and existential conflict.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Slot machines leverage this psychological weakness to incredible effect. The unpredictability of payout makes it harder to stop. Social media does the same. Posting to Twitter might yield a big social payoff, in the form of likes, retweets, and replies. Or it might yield no reward at all. Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling the lever.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” the researchers warned in a 2018 presentation later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the presentation continued, Facebook’s systems were designed in a way that delivered users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Every day his team clicked through thousands of posts from around the world, flagging any that broke a rule or crossed a line. It was draining but necessary work, he felt. But over some months in 2017 and 2018 they had noticed the posts growing more hateful, more conspiratorial, and more extreme. And the more incendiary the post, they sensed, the more widely the platforms spread it. It seemed to them like a pattern, one playing out at once in the dozens of societies and languages they were tasked with overseeing.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Coronavirus conspiracies, promising access to forbidden truths others did not hold, let believers feel certainty and autonomy amid a crisis that had taken away both. By pinning it all on some villain or plot, they gave a senseless tragedy some degree of meaning, however dark. And they offered users a way to take action, first by sharing their secret knowledge with others, then by telling one another that they would band together against whatever culprit the conspiracy blamed. The overarching narrative—coronavirus is a plot by Them to control Us—was everywhere”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Social media was still a machine engineered to distort reality through the lens of tribal conflict and pull users toward extremes. And the pandemic—the specter of an invisible, omnipresent, uncontrollable threat—activated the very emotions that fed the machine, on a scale greater than any other event since the creation of the platforms themselves”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“In Germany, according to the report, more than one third of Facebook’s political groups were deemed extremist. The algorithm itself seemed to be responsible: 64 percent of people in the groups had joined at the system’s suggestion.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Facebook’s “Like” feature, some version of which now exists on every platform, is the equivalent of a car battery hooked up to that sociometer. It gives whoever controls the electric jolts tremendous power over our behavior. It’s not just that “likes” provide the social validation we spend so much of our energy pursuing; it’s that they offer it at an immediacy and scale heretofore unknown in the human experience. Off-line, explicit validation is relatively infrequent. Even rarer is hearing it announced publicly, which is the most powerful form of approval because it conveys our value to the broader community. When’s the last time fifty, sixty, seventy people publicly applauded you off-line? Maybe once every few years—if ever? On social media, it’s a normal morning. Further,”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“These are hours every day that the world's wealthiest companies are taking from you to enrich themselves. Months and years of your life.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“YouTube existed to convert eyeballs into money.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Twitter, and Facebook, and social media platforms are designed for: ‘We’re right. They’re wrong. Let’s put this person down really fast and really hard.’ And it just amplifies every division we have.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“grandstanders trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook engineer who’d also worked on the Like button, told The Guardian. “If we only care about profit maximization, we will go rapidly into dystopia,” he warned. “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Brady found something else. When a liberal posted a tweet with moral-emotional words, its reach substantially increased among other liberals, but declined with conservatives. (And vice versa.) It won the user more overall attention and validation, in other words, at the cost of alienating people from the opposing side. Proof that Twitter encouraged polarization.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Tapping into our deepest psychological needs, then training us to pursue them through commercial consumption that will leave us unfulfilled and coming back for more, has been central to American capitalism since the postwar boom.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Dopamine is social media’s accomplice inside your brain. It’s why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Those stimuli are neurologically meaningless on their own. But your phone pairs them with activities, like texting a friend or looking at photos, that are naturally rewarding.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“if someone had cared to look—were obscured by an ideology that said more time online would create happier and freer souls, and by a strain of Silicon Valley capitalism that empowers a contrarian, brash, almost millenarian engineering subculture to run the companies that run our minds.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Many at the company seemed almost unaware that the platform’s algorithms and design deliberately shape users’ experiences and incentives, and therefore the users themselves.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

“Toyota’s ad budget is fixed. So is the total pool of human attention. Therefore, every time a social network upgrades its systems to steal a few more minutes of someone’s day, they are escalating a technological arms race for your field of vision.”
― Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World