oh dear… these last couple days i have not been able to resist the obsessive scrolling. we on some weird frontiers in the world of social interaction. politics is all about playing to algorithms, creating 10-second sound bites to penetrate the mindless short-form videos that inundate every second of our free time.
an AI-generated video pops up on instagram and i feel a deep repulsion welling within me, i can literally feel the world slipping away from me as my lizard brain slowly grabs the joystick of my brain and tunes me into the synthetic rhythms of algorithms finely-tuned to dominate my attention.
the world needs to get smaller. trump’s populism succeeds precisely because he taps into a fundamental truth of life today: the world has become too complicated, too interconnected, too complex for anyone to understand. people come to rely on simple explanations, and that’s that. i’ve been reading some conservative discussion threads (and boy have i been subjecting myself to these for no good reason – perhaps a morbid curiosity) and i feel the enthusiasm jumping off the page. how i wish i could share their excitement, their optimism! to think that we will be saved by the altruistic billionaires! but it’s self-defeating to rule by grievance, to scapegoat and destroy – easy, giddy emotions!
and we get to this point, primed by social media with short-circuiting attention spans, making us understand the world only through illusions, pleasant aphorisms, stubborn simplicity. it’s at the point where it truly doesn’t matter what trump says or does, what anyone says or does; the walls are built up, we are entrenched in our ideas – and it’s exactly what the billionaires controlling social media want.
and this is common knowledge. yet to know this and still fall victim to the doomscroll… it’s like we don’t remember how to live otherwise.
we need to touch grass. as a society. every one of us, their own patch of green. full palm. if all our interactions with other people are filtered through social media, then we lose that spontaneity of human interaction, that element of unknown that comes from exiting your comfort zone. we have to seek it out.
because what is the endgame for digitized reality? will the next generations even travel? or will we grow to prefer the intricacies of highly personalized simulated realities? completely immersed in an environment constructed by some distant billionaire who is actively plotting any which way they can assert their egotistical dominance over the masses? the convergence of super-intelligent AI with political and social power is no benign intervention in our lives, yet it is the holy grail of tech development. absolute control of people, the death of free thought, and we’ll be good and happy because we’ll have a machine that can erase all our boredom for good.
please, and i tell myself this as much as to anyone else, do not become a subject to the algorithms!!
The Ant and The Paperclip 