Last year Jaron Lanier gave this interview to Channel 4 News.
Its well worth watching and left me feeling uneasy. Jaron says that social media is a more sophisticated form of manipulation than traditional advertising – a billboard and a television set are watched – but social media watches you, mining your emails, viewing habits, comments and purchase history to feed its data hungry algorithms.
Facebook itself admits that its platform was willfully constructed to addict users to the little dopamine hits it provides. Its real payload though (and the product it sells very profitably) is its ability to manipulate the thinking processes (and thus the voting / buying decisions) of its users.
What are the effects for individuals when they find their lives under near constant surveillance and when their thought patterns are being manipulated by cynical actors – what are the consequences for society?
Jaron also notes that the instant algorithms behind social media deliver rapid-fire information that is often purposely intended to inflame desire and outrage. This tends to feed irritability, depression, intolerance and short attention spans – at the expense of more measured (and happier) processes like building trust and respectful dialectic.
As a political blogger I am well aware that outrage generates interest – people love an expose and on Facebook they gather around sites (like mine) that supply the kind of outrage they want.
I try to cover a range of stories from around the world, adding a sprinkling of philosophy and climate change concern as I go – but the truth is most people follow us for UK political scandal from a left leaning perspective – not global climate change statistics or a dialectic about the nature of goodness.
Sodium Haze basically ignores twitter – little good seems to come from it and it was interesting to hear Jaron cast Donald Trump as a victim of his own twitter addiction – something that has left him more unstable and angry than ever before.
It has become an article of faith that the left has to win the social media war of Facebook memes, twitter flames and Instagram influencers – and in a tiny way Sodium Haze is part of that fight…but what we are losing by this pact with the devil?
Facebook is not a charity – it is a corporate monster, really only concerned with itself and the tools of manipulation it deploys for profit. Are we prepared to ‘win’ by any means necessary – even if this means herding people into polarised Facebook groups so they can amplify each others worst tendencies? Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys? Can we be the good guys on social media – or do the platforms inevitably corrode core values, truth and credibility?
What is our reliance on social media as meeting point, chariot and forum costing us and society as a whole? So many people seem to be angry, cynical and dismissive of difference these days, everything feels crankier and more inflamed – maybe we need look no further than our social media feeds to understand why.
The disconnect between social media and reality has got to the point where several environmental groups I am subscribed to were complaining about new data centres being opened locally – on Facebook, but then where else would we complain? Social media is often the only link between islands of people adrift in a fractured and atomised society. Is social media leaving people more isolated rather than less?
It seems to me that we are damned if we do – hypocritically feeding the cogs of manipulative corporate profit machines – and damned if we don’t – because as things stand, to disappear from social media is simply to disappear from most people’s lives altogether.
I wonder why the establishment is so keen for the tentacles of high speed broadband to be as ubiquitous as Coca Cola? We used to live without it and I doubt that this web of 5G hyper-connectivity and smart everythings is being rolled out for our benefit – are we stumbling into total 24/7 surveillance – are we already there?
I find myself hankering for a total internet breakdown – people might write me a letter then, they might phone me up so we can go for a walk and kick some winter leaves.
Now shall I put the customary link through to Sodium Haze’s Facebook page at the end of this article? Of course – what else am I going to do?
You know the really crazy thing that got me thinking about all this today…
…a YouTube algorithm delivered that interview into my feed.
Scary isn’t it?
Yes, everyone who objects to the Mass Surveillance Military Industrial Complex should abandon social media. We can’t stop it, but we don’t have to be willing collaborators. There are other ways of keeping in touch with friends and with what’s going on in the world. I’d like to see a mass boycott of FB and Twitter, even if just for a day. Take the power back.