This article has put his book on my 'must read' list. The hardest idea to get across to my conservative family is that what I am concerned most about is not their right-leaning politics, but their...
This article has put his book on my 'must read' list. The hardest idea to get across to my conservative family is that what I am concerned most about is not their right-leaning politics, but their black and white mindset and that it is a mindset that exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Hopefully this book will give me better language to explain myself.
I still don't like people using "the internet" or "social media" as a catch-all term for stuff that optimizes for engagement and addictiveness. They should be much more specific and talk about the...
I still don't like people using "the internet" or "social media" as a catch-all term for stuff that optimizes for engagement and addictiveness. They should be much more specific and talk about the monopolistic power of the large social media platforms instead. The blogosphere and forum culture didn't exhibit what he's talking about and painting with too broad of a brush misses the key malefactors here.
But overall his argument is good. Debunking the naive assumptions underlying the internet's "free speech" culture and the ways in which reasonable discussions become impossible to engage in. In particular:
The right has latched on to disinformation, conspiracism, and trolling because they have the power to do those things. And they’re really good at them. The left has latched on to canceling because the left has the power to do those things and is really good at them. But they could swap tomorrow, and they probably will. So we mustn’t think of canceling as a left-wing phenomenon. It’s a weapon; it’s an information-warfare phenomenon. And if one side gets it, you can be sure [that] eventually the other side will get it too.
Having made that distinction, I said the second big point of my book is: You’re being manipulated. People tend to think of cancel culture as this bad thing that goes on online or it’s because of repressive ideologies. I want them to say, “No, actually this belongs in the same bucket as the stuff Trump is doing.” Maybe the ideological goals of the people using it are different, but they are also waging information warfare. By information warfare, I mean organizing and manipulating the social and media environment for political advantage in order to divide, dominate, disorient, and ultimately demoralize the people on the other side.
One way to do that is to flood the zone with falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and to cause mass disorientation. Another way is trolling: using outrage to hijack people’s brains. But another way to do that is use social pressure to silence, demoralize, isolate, and shame those who are your targets. And anyone can be the target. It turns out probably the most frequent victims of canceling are progressives who are canceled by other progressives. This is about dominating the information space by shutting down, chilling a whole sector of that space.
Saying that people are "being manipulated" implies someone is doing the manipulating. And sure, some of it is intentional, but I think a lot of it is evolutionary in a sense. After someone posts...
Saying that people are "being manipulated" implies someone is doing the manipulating. And sure, some of it is intentional, but I think a lot of it is evolutionary in a sense.
After someone posts something, they have no control about how far it spreads and how people interpret it. It's fairly common for a negative reaction to it to spread more than the original.
As a result, you can see dark patterns of interaction that no single person really intended, but people get caught up in.
This article has put his book on my 'must read' list. The hardest idea to get across to my conservative family is that what I am concerned most about is not their right-leaning politics, but their black and white mindset and that it is a mindset that exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Hopefully this book will give me better language to explain myself.
I still don't like people using "the internet" or "social media" as a catch-all term for stuff that optimizes for engagement and addictiveness. They should be much more specific and talk about the monopolistic power of the large social media platforms instead. The blogosphere and forum culture didn't exhibit what he's talking about and painting with too broad of a brush misses the key malefactors here.
But overall his argument is good. Debunking the naive assumptions underlying the internet's "free speech" culture and the ways in which reasonable discussions become impossible to engage in. In particular:
Saying that people are "being manipulated" implies someone is doing the manipulating. And sure, some of it is intentional, but I think a lot of it is evolutionary in a sense.
After someone posts something, they have no control about how far it spreads and how people interpret it. It's fairly common for a negative reaction to it to spread more than the original.
As a result, you can see dark patterns of interaction that no single person really intended, but people get caught up in.