Is Social Media Training Us to Please a Machine? (damagemag.com) 69
A remarkably literary critique of the internet appeared recently in Damage magazine — a project of the nonprofit Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry funded by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation. "There are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon..." argues writer Sam Kriss.
"We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another — but in a sense, we're not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through." Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they'll say valid or based, or say y'all despite being British....
Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there's a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it's not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels....
The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. "The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.
As more and more of your social life takes place online, you're training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don't vanish once you look away from the screen.... many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don't like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all.
"For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."
So while recent books look for historical antecedents, "I still think that the internet is a serious break from what we had before," Kriss argues. "And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison."
"We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another — but in a sense, we're not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through." Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they'll say valid or based, or say y'all despite being British....
Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there's a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it's not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels....
The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. "The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.
As more and more of your social life takes place online, you're training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don't vanish once you look away from the screen.... many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don't like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all.
"For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."
So while recent books look for historical antecedents, "I still think that the internet is a serious break from what we had before," Kriss argues. "And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison."
Pretty much on the money. (Score:2)
Twitter is a cesspit. FB, Insta, Snap, Tiktok, all of social media.
Two edged sword, and all that.
That's why the CCP censor the hell out it and use it to destabilise the West.
Re: Pretty much on the money. (Score:2)
Is it the CCP? I donâ(TM)t see much from them. Usually pro Russian, anti liberal. But, I canâ(TM)t tell the difference between the Russian agitprop and the NewCorp alt-right agitprop. I think they had a board meeting and decided to carve up the world. Amicably.
Re:Pretty much on the money. = Trauma? (Score:2)
Not a bad FP. Don't much like your conclusion, especially when you tilt it to China. I would say they are focused on defense from these problems and on stabilizing their own country, which may be fundamentally too big to be stable, but you jump to offensive uses, and I don't think the Chinese are even in the top three countries for cyber-offense. (As I thought about the list a bit more, I'm not sure China would even make my top 10...)
However I was thinking more broadly about the topic recently from the fram
Re: Pretty much on the money. = Trauma? (Score:2)
Are you serious ?
The CCP is literally writing the book on internet/social media social control.
How's your social credit score coming along ?
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The CCP and the Russian propaganda department, until February never have lost an engagement they were called to handle.
Had Putin not started his war, it would be almost 100% certain that Le Pen would have won France, and that other European countries would wind up with right-wing leadership. The US definitely would have leaned right in the polls, and by 2023, Biden would likely just be a target for impeachments for vague charges over and over again. When 2025 came around, between the Republican ability to
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With this also damaged the CCP, had Putin not attacked after the Olympics, in less than three years, the CCP and Russia's propaganda department would literally have completely fragmented the West [...]
Literally?
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Literally? What's this book?
Re: Pretty much on the money. (Score:3)
I think there is an exaggerated anger towards social media. Their role in society is exaggerated in my personal opinion.
We're just playing the blame game. Society is turning bitter. Instead of dealing with this, we externalise the cause to social media. I
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You're excluding everyone that respects privacy and realises that Facebook is a divisive shithole. Facebook has done so many things wrong from fuelling hate to refusing to stop showing ads for illegal plots of Brazilian rainforest. You should not support it with your membership and data.
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It would also be less bad if it weren't a walled garden, I never visit anything on it and it's bad because it's now exclusionary, you either put up with their privacy invasion or you're out. You're supporting that.
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What, like your name and phone number and every conversation you ever have on their, every photo you ever upload etc? You statement makes no sense. This is nothing to do with 'crystallizing on facebook' This is about Facebook itself being complete scum lead by the master scumbag Zuckerberg who has literally called you a dumb f*** and you're proving it.
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I cannot counter your argument that I am a proven dumb f****. Although the only thing I did was highlight some nice positive things about facebook. Everything has some positive sides.
During the studies for one of my thre
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Gonna have to godwin this, h!tler no doubt did some nice things too, doeesm't mean his was a nice man though, that will still be true in ten years. No-one with a conscience should be using Facebook, by using it you are supporting the company and all of the constant nasty things they do.
Nestle chocolate is nice to eat but I don't eat it because Nestle keep pushing baby formula on mothers were the water is not safe for babies to drink, they die. So their chocolate may be nice but I know I can't buy it and be
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I am on a few groups on Facebook. They are great. One is of our town. The other one is a bunch of electronics hobbyists. We help each other out when stuff does not work, etc. I use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends who moved to other countries.
I think there is an exaggerated anger towards social media. Their role in society is exaggerated in my personal opinion.
While it is possible to use Facebook in a non-confrontational manner, I might note that you apparently just touch the surface of it.
I was required to have a Facebook account because of work, so far so good. Then my family and old friends found me.
The family are largely left wing, and I dare not post my opinion on anything. Unless I want attacked for it. I have a friend who is a grea
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Hmmm, the facebook algorithm probably figured out I do not like heavy confrontational stuff. So my facebook experience is all rainbows and pony's. May explain all the soothing book quotes I get in my feed.
That reminds me - I always wanted to hire Enya to sing me to sleep.
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Shit, /. was doing this before the CCP even knew the Internet existed. Where do you think the term karma whoring came from?
It's everywhere, it's in every online forum that has votes or likes and transcends politics and everything else. Would you post something that you know will get downvotes?
New flash: Teens copy and bully each other (Score:3)
As far as empathy, kids are sociopaths. They develop, hopefully, awareness of others over time. But there is great need to succeed and find approval from peers. So a teen is not concerned that a teacher has a family to feed. All they know is of they can get the teacher fired they have a free grade. Now, if that teacher went to the student drive through window and got them fired, the student would file a lawsuit. They understand pain, but only in context of tyrmselvex.
And there is nothing wrong with pleasing a marine. Many years ago I was trying workers to use computers to track quality rather than people. It was a challenge because people are much more flexible, so there was no discipline in the workers. But what we were doing required a higher quality product that required discipline.the same with teens now. We are training them to work with machines. And it is painful for the adults who never acquired that skill.
But what I find most distressing is the extreme lack of scope often found in fake science. That kids have never had fewer friends. Yes, in a limited domain this may be true. But go back before adolescence was a thing. Before the phone. Before most lived in cities. Before education after 10 or 12. How many people who were not related to you did you know? Isnâ(TM)t that the whole point of those drudgery boring books that English teachers like. For the woman to find one non relative to marry.
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I found particularly pleasing the invention of new words:
They understand pain, but only in context of tyrmselvex.
This almost seems like one for the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:
tyrmselvex: a sense of self twisted by lack of realworld experience.
Reading the TFS... (Score:4, Funny)
I made it to about half before the nonsense become so overwhelming I had to stop reading further.
Around this bit:
"The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.
Congratulations. That was the dumbest shit I read/heard/saw in a long while.
Including news about a Texas judge arrested the other day for stealing cattle and a story about a local politician, his grandfather and his grandfather's horse (there's no story - that's the story... let's talk about THAT in an election year).
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Yeah, when I read that sentence, I though - beware of the blind. They can't see your face.
I took a look... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's next, David, quoting RT?
Re:I took a look... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which might mean the machine not only became self-aware, but began to experience remorse at what it's doing to humanity.
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--
Did you mean "for all intents and purposes"?
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Yup. I once got asked to proofread an acquaintance's social-sciences PhD. In the end I had to give up, it read like something that had been generated with a Markov model.
And that's not snark, it literally read like machine-generated text created by a Markov model. It took me awhile to figure out how to tell them politely that they'd handed me a bound volume of gibberish to read, and that I could have produced the same thing in about 30 minutes with the appropriate software and a training data set.
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Professor Smith is clearly learned both as a philosopher and intellectual historian. Surely an intellectual of his stature could have produced a more orderly account. It is an erudite tome but one with little logic and no plot. What is the point of the book? A rambling account of some of the work of Leibniz, Babbage, Lovelace and others that were necessary advancements of software and digitization. Very disappointing.
And if you did enjoy this book, could I recommend Computer Theology: Intelligent Design of the World Wide Web [amazon.com] which looks like it should go on the shelf next to Smith's book.
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for a moment lets assume that people have fewer real friends and more virtual ones, well should this also lead to people being less prone to follow some politician in real life and do most of their fighting in VR? If so, we are finally beginning to solve the problem or wars, governments start wars and people follow blindly because of this collective feeling 'of something greater'... If people can finally get rid of this stupid idea, that there is 'something greater' than themselves, nobody would follow a
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. (Score:3)
There. I said it. I know everyone here was thinking about it.
In Soviet Russia, machine pleases you.
1: Invent AI that sets people against other people to keep them fragmented into small, ideologically isolated groups ...
2: Popularize AI, ensure that all internet users are at least tangentially manipulated by a higher intelligence
3:
4: Profit!!!
And let me add . . . (Score:3)
Google is not evil. They just want to help everyone.
MicroSoft Windows NT 4.0 is the most secure operating system on the planet.
The Intarweb is the new "Town Square" and must be regulated acco . . .
"Oh, come on!! I can't do this . . . I don't care what's in it for me, I just can't! Sure, just wave that giant electromagnet over my house, I donf*^&)ks+@3&(OSs.1.+ + +ATH
[Connection reset by remote host]
And now, a few words from COLOSSUS. (Score:2)
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Google is not evil. They just want to help everyone.
MicroSoft Windows NT 4.0 is the most secure operating system on the planet.
The Intarweb is the new "Town Square" and must be regulated acco . . .
Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
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He's one of the main characters in "The Manchurian Candidate". Funnily enough, I was reading the article [wikipedia.org] a couple of days ago.
If you skip across to the article about the original novel, there's a link to this story [sfgate.com]. Almost unbelievably, parts of this Cold War thriller were plagiarized from "I, Claudius"
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Corollary to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory? (Score:2)
So while the brutishness of anonymity online has been labored over, it seems the herd mentality of being verified (and the outgrowth of that being influencer culture) is coming home to roost.
It always struck me as strange that mass media will condemn the fringe as outposts for for radicalization and whatnot while displaying a peculiar blindness to their own.
It doesn't matter what you think (Score:2)
Same crap, different tech (Score:3)
Every time we come up with new media, people talk about how it will destroy the world. Books would destroy the government. Newspapers would destroy the government. Radio will ... TV will destroy ... The internet will...
People are not ants. We are smarter than the machines. As a group, we are smarter than the people that made the machines.
Back when newspapers were really taking off (Score:2)
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As a group, we are smarter than the people that made the machines.
I very much do not think so. As groups, people are utterly dumb. That said, as individuals a lot of people are actually pretty smart and decent. But put them in groups and even basically decent people get caught in fatal dynamics.
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Social Media is like Heroin (Score:2)
Social media isnâ(TM)t training me. (Score:2)
One caveat, if you think you are not manipulated you are probably manipulated more than the average.
But, Iâ(TM)m different, Iâ(TM)m not stuck in the internet with social media, social media is stuck in here with me!!!!
Sort of gives new meaning (Score:2)
To the Netflix show Love, Death, and Robots
No one (Score:2)
No one knows how to please a machine more than a machine....
Am I right....? Fellas?
Ladies?
Singularity Pulsating Orb Thing?
Internet is a poison (Score:3)
The difference between medicine and poison is in the dose.
Define "machine" (Score:2)
We've always couched our language to be comfortable when heard by the people who have power over us, and for as long as we've had literacy we've learned to be circumspect with what we write, else those with power will punish us. "Social media" is just what's new and strange to you, so when you become aware of how the world works you accuse the thing you don't fully understand as being the perverse element t
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Yes, pretty much. Also, decreased empathy (or none) towards people not in ones in-group is also a very, very old thing and nothing new even in children. The only difference now is that far more people create easily observable statements (such as I am doing now), when that historically was only done by small groups of people. Hence the problem is very old, and social media only made it a lot more visible.
I do not really agree on the "hand gripping a tools" idea as to the root cause, I think the real problem
Dogs (Score:2)
The *machines* are training us to please them (Score:1)
I can't even begin to count the number of times I've stood with my soapy hands in a sink, trying to wave my hands in just the right way to gain the automated faucet's approval...
Could Betteridge be wrong? (Score:1)
Vonnegut on computers (Score:2)
Well, duh? (Score:1)
How is the "metaverse" that Zuckerfucker & Co. are creating any different than the Matrix in the movie of the same name?
Facebook wants the world to plug in, live in the fantasy world they create, and never leave. The only difference between that and the movie is that the social media sociopaths do it to fuel their greed, while their movie counterparts did it to create energy.
Do you have to wait until you hear them refering to non-techies as "crops" b
tool is tool (Score:1)
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low-quality options (Score:1)