Eyes That Bite
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
Ouch. Right between the eyes. Lately I've been mournfully surveying my bookshelves and realizing how much my reading has shifted away from whole books. In trying to get back to it, I feel like in some ways I'm learning to read all over again.
The average state of the universe is hard vacuum with a sprinkling of hydrogen, but I'm still going to aim a bit higher myself. You do you, though.
I worry particular about broad systematic losses in empathy relative to the previous baseline. Maybe this is a side-effect of changes to our attention, but it sounds like a much bigger problem. Writing made us more forgetful, but it also had tremendous upsides. I struggle to see comparable benefits from the skim/filter mindset. It seems like it's more of a defensive reaction to the amount of garbage online than something that can elevate human thought as a transformative mental tool.
People can of course use it to construct echo chambers, which don't help empathy. And the rise of "the cruelty is the point" politics surely owes something to the changes in media, but that's harder to untangle.
Its not that people could construct echo chambers (as some far off thought), its that they have, and they lied about it to you and everyone else (through omission and redirection), and they continue to do so regularly.
If you are on any kind of social media, you are always in an echo chamber.
I'm not going to go into all the arguments, you can do your own research, but the two that deserve the most attention are the optimization for engagement which optimizes for both positive and negative content and subversion aspect.
Have you ever heard of the Alt-right pipeline?
Its becoming fairly well documented, its basically a series of content that after watching, you are shown other content, and that content becomes gradually more and more extreme. Most of the time its very subtle (10 or more steps), and those algorithms and software are designed so you only see content that is optimized in this way, and they intentionally make visible objective video and history limited. You may notice previous watched videos disappear unless you know a direct keyword to locate them again, it was engineered as intended.
The way it goes, you might watch a video that pops to the Joel Rogan podcast for a guest speaker you are interested in, that then shows some interesting intellectual things with Jordan Peterson, and after a series of next content, maybe eventually you arrive at David Iccke and his talks about the greys and the reptilians (conspiracy of the Lizard Illimunati), QAnon, Neo nazis, or something else that are extreme or radical (and many steps removed). It sounds crazy, but its been documented.
Social media is the perfect propaganda machine, because its a 1 to many platform because there are methods in place to allow someone to dictate what you see, and limit what people see you say (amplification and de-amplification). Policies are geared to allow this weakness by design. You might notice the mass media does the same thing, and you'd be right, but they were less effective for this purpose.
As American's we aren't taught a lot about propaganda, which in my opinion does everyone a huge disservice because you can't recognize misinformation and propaganda without knowing what its goals are. Other countries unfortunately have also followed our lead in this regard. Its also difficult to punish entities that push it because its largely considered protected by free speech since Corporations are people.
Most people I've met domestically and abroad only have a very naive understanding of what propaganda actually is, and I haven't met a person who could tell me what its goals were when asked.
In other more restrictive countries its illegal, and the methods are taught (depending on the country) for their benefit, and it often goes by another name called subversion or more fully ideological subversion.
This has been used by all governments, historically, ever since WW2 as the nuclear age became too risky for outright conflict in a MAD world.
So non-alerting methods were developed to overthrow foreign governments without war, aimed primarily at manipulating the targeted countries citizens into unrest allowing a small minority to overthrowing the repressive regimes at little loss of life to the country performing these machinations.
It is sophisticated and subtle, its strength is it flies in under the radar, and it often employs many well-known psychological blindspots to do this which everyone has.
One of the primary targets is often the next generation's children because they lack the critical thinking faculties to discern the threat before age 12 due to developmental biology.
Cialdini wrote a book detailing many of those blindspots and examples where they've been used in his book called Influence.
The overall goal is, putting you into a psychological state where you can't react, or you react so irrationally that you jump at shadows with little provocation. The intended effect is discord and disunity, so no organized response occurs, and to corrupt aspects that make up a citizens national, religious, or moral identity since this leads to further discord and disunity and these people are unable to recognize truth from fiction in this irrational state.
In that kind of diabolical coup, those irrational people are almost always killed later, after a change has been instrumented to solidify the new normal (power structure).
If you were taught proper modern history (WW2+), you'd already know a lot of this, but I didn't get that sense from your response (hence my response). This is also why this topic and related references have largely been removed from public education, the same has also occurred regarding socialism's negative aspects in that sphere, and we are seeing a lot of conflict spawned from various movement sponsored ideals that lack true understanding of the underlying philosophy they subscribe to lately which is very worrisome.
I can only suppose that you've had this 19-paragraph rant (parts of which I actually agree with, if not the whole) brewing your head too long and it just came spewing out at the first trigger. I can only to encourage you to work on your reading skills, so that you are responding to things people actually say. You might also consider when you're writing that maybe you're talking to somebody who already understands what you're about to say but still has a different opinion. And that when you do that, instead of coming across as smartly as you intended, you look to them like a hugely fucking arrogant goof.
In order to learn you have to risk being offended, in order to think you have to risk being offensive. Its a core requirement for intelligent thought and I generally assume anyone I'm talking to is intelligent otherwise I wouldn't bother.
As for what I've said, since you don't address any of the specific points I made that you disagree with, I find its likely you didn't bother reading, though I realize it is a lot of text. I've had a lot of people say they agree with the most or in part like that so I'm skeptical. If I'm wrong, that's fine. Feel free to come back to it if that is the case.
If not, that's fine too, though I would have preferred you being direct; you could have just said I'm not going to read that.
What I've said is supported, historically, or is growing in support as its documented, and in either case whatever the reason its your loss if you don't take anything away from it or do your own research.
I firmly believe its better to give people the opportunity to find out something they didn't know rather than shut down anything that a person disagrees with because its the disagreements that often lead both parties engaged in discussion to a better understanding assuming its not one-way as this was/appears.
Most of what you read consisted of opinions (regarding social media), or material I've found after reading a lot of history and economics books. specifically WW2, Iran coup of 1953, Vietnam, Stasi, Fall of USSR (Russia), China (Mao)
History is an acquired taste, and unless you're talking to a historian, how would you get anyone else interested in history but by sharing those insights and recommending they do their own research?
The nice thing about it learning history, it lets you learn things from previous generations that people generally don't recognize as being important precursors because you are working on a larger time horizon cyclical things become more apparent.
Many times the people who are often regarded later as visionaries are often simply those who were well educated in a wide swath of history. As a result they generally know what's been tried before and the challenges and don't commit to repeating the same mistakes.
As an anecdote, there was a roman senator who wrote many things about the politics of Rome that if you hadn't known the origin of the author or his writing you might easily confuse it since it compares surprisingly close to descriptions of modern American politics.
I tried to provide enough detail that if you wanted, you could go and read more about it, though with propaganda you'll have to wade into a sea of of misinformation. Also with that material,you can't generally assume anything is truth by default, you have often to approach it as false and prove something is true and without a detrimental hidden agenda.
As for the rest, you shouldn't take things personally, opinions are semi-fluid, they change as we age and acquire more accurate or useful information and everyone makes mistakes regardless of their intent, you can't be human and not make mistakes. I'm no exception, but everything I said I've vetted before saying.
Edit: In case you didn't notice, I made a specific point in not attacking you but instead at that opinion, you probably confounded what I said when reading, as that's an important distinction.
I said what I think about that opinion in my previous response. You and your opinion are definitely not the same thing, nor static, and HN edits to attempt clarify that point don't necessarily work that well. It would be nice if HN had a way to preview a draft ahead of time. These small text boxes are ridiculously difficult to work with when trying to write cohesively. Spell check would be nice too.
I read it. I just didn't think a detailed reply was worth my time. For reasons I thought I made pretty clear.