Are Technologies of Connection Tearing Us Apart? (lareviewofbooks.org) 87
Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. But his new book looks at how social media and digital communication technologies "are changing us individually and collectively," writes the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The book's title? Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart . But if these systems are indeed tearing us apart, the reasons are neither obvious nor simple. Carr suggests that this isn't really about the evil behavior of our tech overlords but about how we have "been telling ourselves lies about communication — and about ourselves.... Well before the net came along," says Carr, "[the] evidence was telling us that flooding the public square with more information from more sources was not going to open people's minds or engender more thoughtful discussions. It wasn't even going to make people better informed...."
At root, we're the problem. Our minds don't simply distill useful knowledge from a mass of raw data. They use shortcuts, rules of thumb, heuristic hacks — which is how we were able to think fast enough to survive on the savage savanna. We pay heed, for example, to what we experience most often. "Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity," says Carr. "What's true is what comes out of the machine most often...." Reality can't compete with the internet's steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls "disciplined acculturation."
Not only are these technologies designed to leverage our foibles, but we are also changed by them, as Carr points out: "We adapt to technology's contours as we adapt to the land's and the climate's." As a result, by designing technology, we redesign ourselves. "In engineering what we pay attention to, [social media] engineers [...] how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world," Carr writes. We become dislocated, abstracted: the self must itself be curated in memeable form. "Looking at screens made me think in screens," writes poet Annelyse Gelman. "Looking at pixels made me think in pixels...."
That's not to say that we can't have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading. An option Carr doesn't mention is to require companies to perform safety studies on their products, as we demand of pharmaceutical companies. Such measures have already been proposed for AI. But Carr doubts that increasing friction will make much difference. And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material. We can follow Samuel Johnson's refutation of immaterialism by "kicking the stone," reminding ourselves of what is real.
The book's title? Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart . But if these systems are indeed tearing us apart, the reasons are neither obvious nor simple. Carr suggests that this isn't really about the evil behavior of our tech overlords but about how we have "been telling ourselves lies about communication — and about ourselves.... Well before the net came along," says Carr, "[the] evidence was telling us that flooding the public square with more information from more sources was not going to open people's minds or engender more thoughtful discussions. It wasn't even going to make people better informed...."
At root, we're the problem. Our minds don't simply distill useful knowledge from a mass of raw data. They use shortcuts, rules of thumb, heuristic hacks — which is how we were able to think fast enough to survive on the savage savanna. We pay heed, for example, to what we experience most often. "Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity," says Carr. "What's true is what comes out of the machine most often...." Reality can't compete with the internet's steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls "disciplined acculturation."
Not only are these technologies designed to leverage our foibles, but we are also changed by them, as Carr points out: "We adapt to technology's contours as we adapt to the land's and the climate's." As a result, by designing technology, we redesign ourselves. "In engineering what we pay attention to, [social media] engineers [...] how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world," Carr writes. We become dislocated, abstracted: the self must itself be curated in memeable form. "Looking at screens made me think in screens," writes poet Annelyse Gelman. "Looking at pixels made me think in pixels...."
That's not to say that we can't have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading. An option Carr doesn't mention is to require companies to perform safety studies on their products, as we demand of pharmaceutical companies. Such measures have already been proposed for AI. But Carr doubts that increasing friction will make much difference. And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material. We can follow Samuel Johnson's refutation of immaterialism by "kicking the stone," reminding ourselves of what is real.
It's probably accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean look at the way we use mathematics for example, we have to break it all down into simple algorithms in order to process it. But this:
That's not to say that we can't have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading.
It smells of putting free speech at a premium. I.e. the more money you have, the more you can free speech.
And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material.
By ourselves, it sounds like he means other people that aren't him.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading.
It smells of putting free speech at a premium. I.e. the more money you have, the more you can free speech.
The "small transactional costs" intended to "restore friction" are usually things like making people wait 10 seconds before they can submit their post or requiring them to click a link to an embedded news article before resharing someone else's post. They're not monetary costs.
And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material.
By ourselves, it sounds like he means other people that aren't him.
Triggered much?
Re: It's probably accurate (Score:1)
... Only if the "cost" is financial.
What if the "cost" is that you can only post once per 10 minutes?
Would this make the content on x, or reddit, or slashdot better?
Re: (Score:2)
The cost doesn't have to be monetary. It could just delay posting for a few seconds, to stop people mindlessly clicking that repost button on every bit of misinformation they see.
Re: (Score:2)
We have the technology to track likes and dislikes. Let's amend the Constitution that we can simply vote people we don't like off the island (or continent).
"The only winning move is not to play."
Re:It's probably accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
> It smells of putting free speech at a premium
No, where did you get that idea from?
Transactional costs mean to delay anyone’s posting, so that things like the Southport riots can’t happen because of some maniac racists tweet. It's not about money, but delays, barriers.
We had perfectly functional free speech in the days when it would require you to mail your response to the editor. Just because the editor might not publish, doesn’t affect free speech as that is not what free speech is.
Free speech is NOT the ability to post unregulated, unchecked content maliciously intended to trigger a riot and break law. Free speech is the freedom to not be persecuted by the state for speaking out against the state. Basically you can disagree with your government and well, nuts to them if they don’t like it.
But in almost all countries that have free speech, we have all agreed to not have absolute free speech so there are things you can say that will land you in trouble. We all agreed to have such limits. It's the same with say, driving? I am free to drive my car practically anywhere, except for a few places. I'm also not free to drive too fast... and I'm not free to run over people who are in my way, or to drive at someone I don’t like to shock them, which would make the car into a weapon.
But I'm free to drive my car!
The system we have at this time may allow the instant dissemination of thoughts and feelings with no delays, and that may feel like the ultimate in "free speech" but it isn’t. It's just a means to disseminate crap quickly. Besides, free speech doesn’t really apply with private systems in the same way it doesn’t apply to writing letters to a newspaper. Free speech is about the government, the state, and how THEY deal with you.
Re: (Score:2)
It smells of putting free speech at a premium. I.e. the more money you have, the more you can free speech
This is literally what we already have in multiple ways in the US.
Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
Censorship is the problem. Internet can reroute around failures but humans rarely try twice. When someone is banned they just disappear. When you combine this with infinite scroll and no organization layouts like twitter, they're effectively removed from your memory. Text messages that go undelivered because of algorithmic classification look ignored. Your friend on Facebook doesn't show up on your feed but celebrities do.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Censorship is the problem. Internet can reroute around failures but humans rarely try twice. When someone is banned they just disappear.
Exactly. After Twitter censored this guy [x.com], we've never heard from him again.
Re:Censorship (Score:4, Informative)
You mean, we never heard from him after he posted his whine earlier today? He wasn't able to later post [x.com] that he fell for a scam?
Re: (Score:2)
Curious what the motive of the sender of that email is.
Re: Censorship (Score:2)
That's not censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
You're complaint isn't that you're being censored. You can easily set up a free website damn near anywhere and say damn near anything except for Neo-Nazi shit (you need a lot of money if you want to be a Neo-Nazi on the internet and get away with it).
No it's not about censorship, you've got plenty of ways to get your voice out. What people who bitch about censorship are upset about is they don't have access to an audience for free anymore. You can't just pop in and be a complete asshole and not get banned.
What irritates me the most is people who think if we get rid of section 230 of the CDA that they'll have this Paradise of the internet where they can be a complete asshole and get away with it. They're wrong. Killing s230 is just going to turn the internet into cable television. You'll have real censorship like you do on TV. And you won't be able to just spin up a website and do whatever you want with it anymore.
But they're not thinking that far ahead, they can't. Too much propaganda in their heads.
Re: (Score:3)
That's you being an asshole and people showing you the door.
You're complaint isn't that you're being censored. You can easily set up a free website damn near anywhere and say damn near anything except for Neo-Nazi shit (you need a lot of money if you want to be a Neo-Nazi on the internet and get away with it).
No it's not about censorship, you've got plenty of ways to get your voice out. What people who bitch about censorship are upset about is they don't have access to an audience for free anymore. You can't just pop in and be a complete asshole and not get banned.
I've long said that too many people confuse freedom of expression (not just speech, if you want to put your message out in written word or interpretive dance, go for it) with immunity from criticism. What most of the people complaining that they've "been cancelled" or claiming "you can't say anything any more" are really trying to claim is immunity from criticism. They idea that they get to say whatever they want and the rest of us must sit here and silently agree with them. That isn't freedom of expression
How people are retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How people are retarded (Score:4, Interesting)
Disagree.
While there is something to be said about the preponderance of evidence, you cannot in the same breath point out the rise of fringe conspiracy theories while also point to majority opinion holding sway.
Prior to social media we had mass media, whispering campaigns, and gossip galore. Same problems and eventually people get wise to who is lying to them and excise them from their attention, especially with mass repetition (see cable tv).
Truth of the matter is the quality of discourse has plummeted (especially from the early days of the web) with attention whores to monetary gains and censorship and gamification. The signal to noise ratio isn't worth the effort, so even more people with wise observations check-out and leave the banal to dominate the discussion.
"Social media" is just a boogeyman, much like comic books, pinball, and telephones before. The problem isn't so much as described (Mcluhan would have something to say about that), but the gatekeepers tut-tutting the unvarnished public and the commercialization of the web.
Re: (Score:1)
Which early days are of the net are you talking about? Which good old days are these?
I was there for Usenet. There was just as much trash and idiocy and knuckleheads taking over groups and other bullshit as now.
My favorite was a bunch of pro wrestling fans who took over some random nearly dead group, stomping through it like digital ancient Vikings marauding the British coast. There was much crying and calls for control and blah blah blah which went nowhere as no one controlled Usenet.
There was never a
Re: (Score:3)
The irony of pointing out the quality; to have someone conflate it with quantity.
And then omitting the evolution of the web to conflate it with people have changed (which they have, or has your entire thought process ossified?).
Yeah.
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Way to make stuff up.
ESL?
Re: (Score:2)
> by the time it gets good at stuff it can just convince 90% of humanity to eat Tide Pods.
Exactly, or to fire the nukes themselves!
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The answer is no, of course (Score:3)
The answer is no, like it always is when the question is in the headline.
It is not technology, it is people. Communication is a tool, it is what is being communicated that is the problem. The problem is the SuperKendalling, the gamification of literarily everything for personal amusement and advantage. Constant lying is what "tears us apart".
Re: (Score:1)
Constant lying is what "tears us apart".
One person's conjecture would be another person's lie, simply because it can't be proven, even if they can't disprove it. The problem with that is, even conjecture is useful. Science and mathematics wouldn't even work without it.
Re: (Score:3)
Presenting conjecture as the truth is simply lying -- that is likely to offer negative value. Presenting conjecture as an idea that might worthy of further investigation -- that has a significant chance of bringing positive value.
Re: (Score:2)
Presenting conjecture as the truth is simply lying
Is it then your assertion that people like Albert Einstein are simply liars? Because he did this a lot. In fact, I'd challenge you to name even one great physicist who hasn't done this.
first fix is (Score:2)
eliminate the tracking
Re: (Score:1)
MAGA is an addiction (Score:4, Insightful)
" ... What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"
Probably the same thing, endless 'reality' (to use the common euphemism) Tv. does, that endless pornography does. The difference is (to borrow from AR Moxon), the US has a hate group run by billionaires, disguised as a major political party. That makes avoiding the endless propaganda, almost impossible. It's not surprising so many people voted for the party of hate. It's surprising so many people stopped joining the half-arsed protest against that hate.
It takes decades to end the propaganda and addiction, to change people's mind-set and emotions. The US can't wait for nice things to happen, so taking control means admitting the alternatives are ugly and violent: To be precise, it requires someone to make those ugly decisions. The people protesting against MAGA, don't have that.
Re:Hate is not confined to MAGA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
The levels of violence demonstrated by pro-choicers
Oops, you've already lost me. This has to be a troll.
Re: (Score:3)
The levels of violence demonstrated by pro-choicers, anti-terfers, pro-gay activists, anti-Israel protesters etc etc is pretty impressive.
Do you mean January 6th? I thought Trump blamed that on the radical left and then pardoned them.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Like you, I still quiver in fear at the thought of all those unarmed grandmas taking selfie tours bringing democracy to the edge of oblivion! I clutch my pearls tightly!
And since they were all pardoned we have seen a huge spike in political assassinations, violent crime in general, and the Nazi right wingers rioting in the streets literally hunting down Jews and Blacks to kill.
And cats. They want to eat your cats, too, Archiebunker. Have you checked on your cats lately? Keep them safe from unarmed grand
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I'm so happy the guy wearing the "Camp Auschwitz" hoodie was given a pardon. https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
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MEOW!
Re:MAGA is an addiction (Score:4, Insightful)
From whom; rich, white men, loud, gold-digging women, the minorities who aren't Christian or heterosexual or wealthy?
I've seen white culture change over a few decades, and I'll admit, "young heterosexual male" is now a minority. But that's not the problem: How does punishing black people, or immigrants or even criminals, restore the rights of isolated and abandoned young heterosexual males? How does anger toward these people, which is anger toward other young heterosexual males, create respect of "masculinity in general"?
Those young heterosexual males didn't join the Republican Party because it offered respect and Equity and Inclusion. It offered segregation and elitism: For young heterosexual males, that was an easy answer to their feelings of isolation and abandonment. It was a distraction that equaled "doing something" and the consequences, weren't important.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep pushing that story. Keep losing elections.
We are not AI We are not slaves (Score:1)
I change my mind sometimes (Score:2)
The problem is propaganda (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody wants their kid coming home with a head full of ideas that they don't agree with. So they keep their kids just as dumb and ignorant as they are so they can keep getting along with them without having to challenge any of their own preconceived and frankly wrong ideas.
In the old days this was less of a problem because people didn't live much past 65 so bad ideas died a little bit younger. Nowadays we're keeping people alive and extra 10 15 sometimes even 20 years and more and so we have a bunch of extremely bad ideas that aren't dying off as quickly as they used to. This is being exploited by the ultra wealthy to make things worse for everybody but themselves.
Again the solution is more critical thinking and education but again no parent is going to tolerate their kid coming home with The skills needed to deconstruct the parent's bad ideas. If those kids come home with those bad ideas the parent isn't going to change their mind about them, that's not how that works, instead they're going to blame the school, join the school board and shut down critical thinking.
Re: (Score:3)
> Nobody wants their kid coming home with a head full of ideas that they don't agree with. So they keep their kids just as dumb and ignorant as they are so they can keep getting along with them without having to challenge any of their own preconceived and frankly wrong ideas.
Maybe that's how you raised your son.
My daughter gets all sorts of dumb shit off the net and at school. We discuss it. I help her analyze it from multiple perspectives and especially always looking at who benefits if she and enough
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, kudos on raising your kid to be a critical thinker.
Personally, I think rsilvergun made the mistake of speaking in absolutes (saying things like "Nobody wants their kid..." and "no parent is going to..." etc.). Clearly, that is untrue, there are parents (like you) who teach their kids to think critically and are unafraid of having their own ideas challenged by doing so.
However, it seems like many parents are in the category that rsilvergun describes (whether they realize it or not). Even if it is not
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, when I see her school work, I'm actually shocked at the level of academics she's getting from public school. Most of her teachers are pretty good and keep her working. I'm no fan of the public school system so they've really earned that praise.
I'm not afraid of her challenging my ideas and world view at all. In addition to life skill training, our discussions have bonding value as well. OTOH, omg raising a teen girl can be a pita sometimes when she does the teen girl emotional thing. At lea
I'm speaking an absolutes (Score:1)
This is not to say that folks like yourself or the person replying to me aren't vulnerable to propaganda. They just need a different type of propaganda. Remember the goal here is to avoid teaching critical thinking and therefore to get folks like you and the other guy to vote against teaching critical thinking to people's kids.
If I had unlimited reach and money for p
The plural of anecdote (Score:1)
You can already see this in just about every school board in America where tiny ass little school board elections are getting huge injections of cash from large corporate interests. And we're
Re: (Score:2)
Lmao, this was so funny and so wrong, I had to stop half way and reply immediately even though I normally read your entire rants before replying.
You are this master manipulator genius who can convince me to vote however you like because you think I'm defensive about... something.
You're a riot. Are you someone's AI experiment? I know there's that AC who always posts about your menstrual cup and being in Singapore and all that but that could be a head fake from your programmers. Kudos to whoever coded you.
I grew up before the internet (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I did too, but I don't think things were better then. The "good old days" aren't actually as good as we remember them. We were just more sheltered by the viewpoints of our parents, who simply didn't tell us about other points of view.
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> And I'm glad I did! Not always "connected" like everything today.
Same here. I saw the internet come into my hoe and boy was it fund being amongst the development of PC's during the 90's.
As a full "in it deep" computer geek I loved everything about it, got my CS degree and so on. Set me up for life, got me a house.
Yet my foundation, nearly the first half of my current years alive, is based on slower and more meaningful methods, like newspapers, books, letters. It took time to look up information, but
Why insiders? (Score:2)
And why does it crash 89% from $4.6 billion, when only $107 million are sold? That does not sound like it was planned. They must have sold way too much at once to get maximum profit.
It takes a while to learn to use new stuff (Score:2)
I predict that we will eventually learn how to make and use social media in a beneficial way
But before that happens, it will probably get worse
nah. (Score:3)
IMPHO... It's entitled people who already had a platform discovering that amplifying themselves no longer drowns out the voices of the poor.
Me, I call it a gutenberg cycle. The point at which, in society, the barrier to remote communication and the time required for it are lowered enough that the average person has a personal capability comparable to what a wealthy person has by default.
It took ~200 years for the Catholic Church to realise that it was no longer in control of peoples' beliefs, that they didn't have the ability to dictate how the average person saw the world in the face of them being able to reassert their experiences to each other. I wonder how long it will take the authoritarians now.
Re: (Score:2)
This is beautiful; I'm glad I scrolled down.
I've always really loved two things about the internet:
1. The low barrier for ordinary people to distribute their thoughts to a wide audience. It goes a long way toward fixing the problem exemplified by the quote, "The freedom of the press is reserved for those who happen to own one."
2. The wider range of content choices compared to television or radio and the ability to block ads.
Algorithmically determined content streams—such as those of most social media
It's the algorithms, stupid! (Score:2)
The problem with social media and the like are the algorithms designed for the highest engagement. Then instead of seeing my friends' photos, I mainly see weird AI shit and random videos trying to grab my attention. Apparently Aliexpress teams up with Facebook, because now I see a bunch of random woodworking shit since I bought some router bits from China.
Of course if I clicked on or searched for political content there, then I'd see more and more political content that I engage with. Pretty soon, I'm a
Re:It's the algorithms, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
You have an option. Stop using Facebook. Why are you there at all? I had to create a bunch of fb accounts for work but only logged in for testing etc. Since that job died I've found 1-2 legitimate reasons per -year- to login. It's a huge void of nothing and wasted bits. Stop logging in.
We've always been torn apart (Score:2)
Conservatives and liberals have existed, and fought with each other, since at least the Roman Empire. With today's ease of communication, we're just better able to self-organize with other like-minded people, even if they aren't located near us.
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> we're just better able to self-organize with other like-minded people, even if they aren't located near us.
Thats exactly the problem. Thast what this is all about helping to minimise.
just slow it down (Score:2)
You can post two replies a day.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
Thats one of the solutions, although I'd say a few hours is more than enough.
Re: just slow it down (Score:2)
Re: just slow it down (Score:2)
Re: just slow it down (Score:2)
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Not really. Lack of (digital) culture is. (Score:2)
Using commercial services that rely on noisemaking and provocation to gain attention and ad-money is a part of that problem, but also basic etiquette and manners. Don't offend easily and don't be easily offended is one rules from back in the days of usenet and fidonet that people these days would benefit from observing.
Re: (Score:1)
Don't offend easily and don't be easily offended is one rules from back in the days of usenet and fidonet that people these days would benefit from observing.
Pseudonymity was a big part of the early internet too. We had a bit of separation because we were taught to never give our real name and age, yet we created a handle that most people used on multiple sites that would have a reputation that could follow it. I think that's mostly lost when a lot of "normies" went online.
OMFG (Score:3)
It's like everything I've been thinking about this very subject has been written down and published.
I mean almost thought for thought this man wrote the same ideas I've been thinking about since around 2010 and a bit earlier.
I grew up in the 90's, that means I was a teen in 1995, 14/15 to be exact. I know how I used to live and connect to the world as an 80's kid and a 90's teen. I saw the internet enter my home, as well as the PC. I lived through that transition, saw magazines disappear and get replaced with online versions. I saw newspapers, local ones, vanish and get replaced by knee-jerkily reactionary terrible looking websites, and god awful Facebook groups.
I've long wanted to revert, to exist in that middle ground again, largely I already do but nobody else does and I see what they do with it. Would the Southport riots have happened so quickly if the only means of posting that message that triggered them was to email, or even send a PAPER LETTER to the editor of the local paper??
"One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs"
Exactly! I have been noticing and thinking the same. Transactional costs give you time to re-think your angered reply, knowing that there is no rush. Nobody is going to see your angry reply for a day or more, a newspaper is edited, must be printed. You have no real guarantee of any sense of speed regarding how quickly your response will get out there. It seems obvious to me that this delay, this cost that increases the effort to make a reply in the first place works better as it actively helps to prevent viral effects, which is the biggest problem we face as modern humans.
We are simply not equipped to handle what has been created. We can’t do it, hence we end up with statues toppled because of fashionable untrue reasons that only are true because so many think so. Our systems allow us to turn true and false into a popularity contest, what is true is based on how many up voted it. YouTube’s system even goes further, removing our ability to counter that as you can’t see dislikes anymore, they are hidden.
And now with so called A.I and deep-fakes, we really are screwed as we fleshy stone age brained apes are totally unable to determine anything at all to be true or false. Our brains are unable to detect reality from a dream, our brains are capable of inventing highly detailed memory in response to all sorts of situations, including simply having someone talk to you.
I mean, I remember a famous case of two kids who helped get their innocent parents banged up for sexual abuse against them. Only, none of it ever happened. This case is the very reason why courts and lawyers are so careful to ask questions in very specific ways, as we know for a fact that two little kids can create a totally false account of sexual abuse by a parent, highly detailed and disturbing, with the kids fully believing that it happened, with all the emotional baggage too. Yet it was proven that it never ever happened al all, and that the memories were created, automatically by the kids brains during the interview process.
When shit like that is able to happen easily, how the hell can you rust anything or anyone you see online and anything you or others you know end up thinking and believing in response to that stimuli.
We are NOT able to do it, and we love to let it happen anyway. Those who disagree, are part of the proble, yet they think they are correct as they simply cant see they are part of the problem.
Will we be able to actually solve this problem? Or are we all just too happy to have fun?
Basically, we need to look back at the way we lived only a decade and a half, two decades ago and re-introduce delays into our communications. There needs to be a cost, a delay, or the need to actually speak to someone vs simply flinging them a single line of text. Humans need delays, we gave ourselves what we consider to be superpowers but we have totally no control over them and think that it’s totally normal and a “sign of the times”.
Stupidity at the speed of light. (Score:1)
Simple and Obvious (Score:1)
I'd disagree with the reason being "neither obvious nor simple". The fact that social media allows you to curate your own echo chamber is a pretty big reason that this. Social skills are like any skill; if you don't exercise it you don't develop it... and dealing with people you disagree with is a skill.
This fact, plus the general time and character limits on replies, means everything controversial is an "either / or" issue even if the common opinion isn't as black and white.
The trans issues are the perfect
Imagine everyone had telepathy (Score:1)
Oblig. Douglas Adams quote (Score:2)
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."