On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society | Hacker News Reader

On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society

calnewport.com

36 pointslnwlebjel27 comments

Social media is 90% outrage farming by nation states and individuals with agendas. I think the experiment failed. Humans in large groups are so trivially manipulated by algorithms.

Our ape brains at large just can't deal with a firehose of manipulation. We're just giving bad actors a key to our subconscious to destroy the fabric of our civilization, and those bad actors are using it as much as they can.

This article is really missing the discussion on the fact that social media is far, far more inauthentic than real humans these days.

I think the outcome here is we tried nothing, and now conclude nothing works. Ok, we tried privacy breaking "protect the children" nonsense. We used to have a much more of public announcement/education system for aspects of society for civil education (School House Rock), for nutrition, for public health (vaccination). All of it has since been deemed frivolous public expenditure - maybe because it worked too well and the need became invisible.

Fully agreed.

Letting Big Social and governments sock it out to try to make this work doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

I really cherish Bluesky / atproto in huge part because it offers some chance for organic exploration, for individuals & orgs to test and try many ways to make social media work, to defang the Advanced Persistent Threats of the info-world. Without data that wouldn't necessarily count for much, but the firehose & backfill are also quite easy to get: humanity stands some chance, isn't quite in such a dark forest with the adversary here.

For me

Twitter: anger

Instagram: vanity

Facebook: pride

Of those, I hate anger the most so I am off twitter, even though it’s still a great place to overhear the latest in the business, geopolitics and tech zeitgeist. You literally hear about things before anyone else. But I decided that life is too short to be angry all the time.

I like instagram because it’s entertaining (and am of the age where I can ignore influencer antics). This is not true of younger folks for whom instagram is a mimetic model (there’s so much bad advice on it — especially on how to be a man or a woman today). As an older person, I want to tell young people: don’t get relationship advice off instagram. They’re so shallow and make you so entitled — “if your guy doesn’t do this, you’re too good for him” is pretty toxic.

Facebook used to be this political rage bait place but everyone’s left so I’m still hanging around with my geezer friends in their 40s. It’s become a place to share travel photos and pictures of kids.

Tiktok: I’m too old for Tiktok but I hear young people use it for news.

Google: I still use Google but young people are now increasingly abandoning Google and search on ChatGPT.

I like your summary, but I'd add...

Instagram & TikTok: bad (or even dangerous) medical and self-help advice

I agree, but we all know that political violence (or any radicalized violence) is not new. Social media, or any kind of mass communications, just makes it easier.

Iryna Zaruska is why I'll keep an eye on alt media. I don't trust conventional media not to curate away content for my own good. You can mock it as FOMO, or racism, but I want to know where in the subway not to sit. This is news I can use. I can't be convinced to go back to Walter Cronkite for my daily memes.

I don’t think it is possible to just “quit” using social media. The problem is that quitting feels to most people like giving you your weapons when your enemy still has them. Maybe if everyone “disarmed” at the same time it would work but how could you coordinate that? No one wants to sit out social media only to let their opponents continue to use it as an effective way to spread THEIR message.

This sounds a bit like an addiction? We need to find ways to exercise influence in the real world, offline. The connections formed through volunteering or public service are the better weapons.

I agree that these platforms are an issue, but I think it's also a matter of how you use them. I spent a couple years on Twitter/X and regret every minute, whereas my time on Instagram has been great. That's because I fed my X algorithm all sorts of rage bait and political content through my interactions and follows, and likewise my Instagram is full of friend's posts, comedy skits, and poetry/literature due to mindful interactions with content. I'm not saying the platforms aren't at fault, because they definitely are, but it's also possible to curate your feeds for stuff that's healthier.

That being said, we shouldn't have to put effort into curating our feeds to ensure we don't become mentally unwell. I'd be happy if every social network disappeared and we went back to chatrooms and maybe 2013 Instagram / some way to share photos with friends.

I'm an older gen-z and I see my younger peers starting to become mindful of the harms of social media. I don't know if it will ever be seen as harmful as smoking, but I have a feeling that the younger crowd is ready for a more mindful form of social media. Anecdotal, but it feels like my generation mostly uses Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, FB and X are more for millennials. We're aware of doomscrolling and stuff, perhaps in the near future we will drop our usage of TikTok and a new, more mindful form of social media will emerge.

edit: just realised I wrote "mindful" 50 million times

Completely agree with Cal but this just isn't going to happen. People's livelihoods depend on these platforms. They're extremely addictive. If one side retreats it only amplifies the voice of the other side. The only way something like a mass exodus from these platforms is possible is through legislation. But the platforms are so powerful and well funded and well lobbied that this is next to impossible. Expect things to get worse before they get better (if they do in fact eventually get better).

Reminds me of the environment. Large companies would rather blame individuals for "not doing enough to save the planet", when in fact we'd be better off with coordinated, collective action through legislation.

Pretty sure you would lose any election where you proposed a fossil fuel tax large enough to cause people to give up their large lots and large cars and overseas vacations and cheap toys, even without any lobbying by any “large companies”.

Corporations, governments and citizens all love passing the buck on climate change. It's a serious matter and also it's somebody else's job.

The addiction to these platforms is real in the younger generation. I try to reduce their screen time, they resist it, they claim they need it to relax.

Man, I'm so glad I was born in the era where kids just played video games instead of this crap. I feel my brain is better off for having sunk so many hours into video games... whereas the modern generation is walking away with deep propaganda brainrot and no attention span.

The light propaganda in Call of Duty 15 years ago is probably less to deal with than the heavy propaganda kids deal with today.

the article reads a lot more like [on social media and saving civil society]

Regardless of what social media is, my hope & desire is that we can get better at it. If we can layer in more context to the things we see online, if we can provide digestible context on who it is posting, I think a lot of the harm and damage could be ameliorated.

But we need to be in a position where folks can build & develop the social networks, where we can experiment more broadly. There's very social technologies available where humanity is afforded some hooks to improve their social media-verses.

It's interesting to me that the Kirk submission that criticizes those celebrating death, and advocating for stepping away from social media, is the one that gets flagged.

Might be because he was in the leaderboard for people that made social media "toxic and dehumanizing" in the first place.

I think it's lazy to say social media is to blame. Political murder and radical ideas have been around pretty much from the beginning of history. Is social media really more effective in radicalizing people than folklore, religion or mass propaganda? People didn't change much, only the means by which they communicate and share ideas.

I think its not so much the specific social media platforms, its the fundamental increase in how densely connected the social graph is and how much information flows across it. We don’t have the capacity to process it as individuals and our instincts lead us astray.

It’s that and the recommendation algorithm. Why is it even needed? How come I can’t just have a network of my friends that I picked and that’s it?

Rhetorical questions, I know why (engagement, profit) — that’s the big issue.

The root cause is the economic inequality. People are angry they so little while Billionaires have massive amounts of money.

> To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

I mean, the lack of global social media platforms didn't do much for RFK or JFK or MLK Jr or Malcolm X or Harvey Milk or...

This sort of thing happens in any society where people have differences over how the state or capital should be used, and where at least some of those people can obtain or craft weapons. It's not just the US, either, though the availability of firearms is far more widespread here than in other Western nations. Canada, the UK, France, all have had politically-motivated assassinations (or attempts at assassinations) in the pre-social media era.

Humans are very good at being awful.

It's classic white-on-white violence. We need to find out why he was radicalised.

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