An un-essay, for those who watched The Social Dilemma, and those who like to read my writing:
I’m thinking about these profit-oriented algorithms which make space for chaos and misinformation.
Thinking about the illusion he’s talking about, the negative connotation of "illusion". What's the opportunity here for me? What if this is an opportunity to see what a really grand illusion is like so I can identify more nuanced illusions?
I’m thinking about “if we can’t agree on what’s true, we won’t be able to handle the real issues.” What if this is capitalism dissolving itself? That it was always going to get to this point and a system was always going to eat itself.
I think about Attention.
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“What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”
This reminds me of the land development industry. How disconnected the investors are from the land. Such vast quantities of money which only hope to seed the land and hope only to grow in the eyes of shareholders and only by the measure of economics.
Which is to say, what if this social media problem is NOT ONLY IN SOCIAL MEDIA. These attitudes dwell within our whole system. Because we value money. That's what money is, in some sense, a language of value. We spend money to create MONEY. Of COURSE. Value begets value, perhaps this is natural and good, simply with misdirected Attention.
Here's some more nuance: As a capitalist with a bank account, I ask myself: am I making more than I’m spending? Good. How can I widen that gap even more? How can I earn the most and spend the least?
There’s something worth articulating in here.
The attitude of making more and spending less works as a gas pedal for white people to get from struggling to make rent up to a point of having money to invest. This is the ideal story.
Something breaks there, though. What do I do with the stockpile which adds up over time? Once there’s enough to invest, there’s enough to share, but I continue to ask myself only one question: Am I making more than I'm spending? How can I widen that gap?
There’s no check point which tells the earner to do that. The attitude remains “make even more, spend even less”.
Maybe it begins so innocent as: "A rainy day is coming. Keep a nest egg."
These ideas don’t seem unreasonable!! But they’re in a vacuum. They don’t account for the storms raging for my neighbor. My neighbor is outside of my nervous system. I am disconnected from my neighbor. As a bachelor, I am only connected to the energy systems of myself, responsible for only myself, and I get brownie points, I get pride, I get righteousness when I carve out a piece of my self and give it away.
My "nervous system" expands when I have a family, perhaps. The tracking of spending and saving become more weighty. Money in and money out. Is there more coming in than there is going out? Can I create an artificial delay between dry seasons where I can survive? Can I build a big enough reservoir that I can be COMFORTABLE in a dry season? But where do I consider the end of Myself in this consideration? As a bachelor it stops at me.
Now here is social media, this grand nervous system!! But it is attuned also to MONEY. But money in the centralized way. As if the whole of social media is a field and I am the crop. Who is the farmer? Who is the farmer's family?
We who programmed social media do not understand the interconnectedness of us to the land, nor of ourselves to each other, these algorithms reflect this disconnect.
My question to you: what do these algorithms point to? What if instead of balance in terms of crops in and crops out, they could speak about balance in terms of a planet's diversity and resilience? A measure not of "never-had-to-fall-down-ness", but instead a value in "getting-back-up-ness". We look not to the wealthy for guidance but the poor who again and again show the human spirit?
This idea is already familiar! This is already the American Ideal in the abstract.
What does it look like to write algorithms which understand the interconnectedness? For software to understand excess and lack. To understand both of these are equally unhealthy to even the software itself. The machines have checks and balances for temperature and voltage. These algorithms for regulation and balance exist within mainframes.
We have the statistics to understand how a poor person behaves relative to a rich person. Obviously one corrective model would become perverse under different circumstances. These models are already outside human control. Designers have fallen prey to their own designs already, so why not this?
How do we remove nobility from these systems, too? I do not believe any path forward will be comfortable. Perhaps even meaningless. I write this paper only for my own pleasure.
Perhaps instead of justice simply feels like breathing. We breathe in and breathe out with faith the air will be there. Our breathing out is NECESSARY. Our breathing out MAKES LIFE WHICH BREATHES OUT INTO US.
What does it look like to apply this to money? I am not compelled to stockpile air. What if money was not fire for warmth for power but air to breathe? What if money was not just fuel for lights and friends, but erosive like rivers behind dams. What if dams are not all bad? What if efficiency works until it, too, spoils? How do we recognize efficiency which has spoiled?
The exercise of visioning is pleasurable in itself. I have no agenda for change or focus, but untangling and unpacking, decompressing, making a mess as an opportunity to put our room back together differently because it would feel good to do so. Not because there is a better way to arrange the bedroom, but because I am changing and it feels good to express that change in physical space.
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Advertisers are paying for my attention so I stumble upon their company. They are asking to be seen. They keep my focus on my phone and put messages in front of you, baked into whatever you’re paying attention to, otherwise.
Funny, though. Scottish tartans, I’ve been told, were a marketing technique to get people to buy material. Still, they are romanticized.
My intention here is to find little leverage points against these systems. Chinks in the armor of giants and the stories which wrap their illusions. My advantage against these forces is that they see me only as a simple raw nerve ending, a consumer deeply entranced by the game of the system I inhabit. So I am.
My advantage and my sovereignty is to accept discomfort as I am able. Perhaps discomfort has always been the way to integrity in connection. The documentary states that the each new technology has threatened a way of humanity, but, the documentary says, social media is different. It adapts beyond the powers of the creators. Such an energy, but without nefarious intent, simply oriented towards energy. Energy in the form of advertising money woven into what we are most excited by — which I interpret to be polarizing nobility rooted more in feeling than in circumstance.
What makes social media different is that it is adaptive. Its goal is to retain attention, because the programmers measure attention in dollars and cents, which is the value.
I’m not going to try and save the world but I can reflect on this, myself, as a participant and as one who intends to be a father one day.
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Is regulation the answer? Data tax?
[this is a hard question to form. Perhaps the very desire to formulate a solution so suddenly is part of this social ecology? Why am I compelled to find an answer? What does it mean to ask more questions? What if there is a better question?]
Who produced this movie? Where did the money come from? What are they motivated by?
The interviewers talk about freedom, does this documentary define freedom? How many definitions of freedom are interpreting this film?
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Perhaps the energy which scrapes the old stagnant ways free is anger. Perhaps the energy which breaks through the shell, the birth canal, is grief. What does it mean to just stand and watch and grieve?
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We created this and we have the chance to change it.
Are we going to change this?
We have to.
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