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Thanks for your comment because I am not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that a certain amount of friction is a necessary part of our survival as a speci

• TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  There are ways in which humans self-organise, amplifying individual intelligence and empathy, and ways in which humans self-disorganise, amplifying the naive ambition, greed, and poor choices of powerful individuals. The challenge is to distinguish between the two. The FB memo is self-serving nonsense, because it tries to deny there's a problem. In fact the problem existed outside FB before FB and the rest were created. Why do we have an economy in which a social network exists primarily to amplify the power of persuasive media? Why do our political fitness functions reward this outcome, instead of the other possible outcomes that social networks could generate? This isn't a problem that can be fixed with more or better software, because it's not a technical problem - it's about politics and values, and how our political economy rewards certain behaviours while punishing, or at least strongly disincentivising, others.
• cousin_it 9y ago
  Yeah. I felt much more free and creative when writing LiveJournal posts, which were guaranteed to be seen by my 10-100ish "friends", than when writing Reddit or HN posts, which must compete with tons of other posts to get seen by 0-infinity people.
• dfsegoat 9y ago
  If I understand what you are saying, I think I might be able to give a personal anecdote to show that most definitely, some "friction" is required to get people organizing and socializing as they traditionally would (outside of social media), and why social media isn't enough: In October 2017, my area was hit by the worst wildfires in California history. For days, there was no power, there was no internet (mobile or otherwise), there was no 911. We had AM/FM radio and our neighbors. For all intents and purposes, we were back to the 1900s. What happened? Well, people in my neighborhood (neighbors) who were all on edge - who had LARGELY ONLY EVER INTERACTED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA (myNextDoor and facebook) - suddenly found that SOCIAL MEDIA wasn't enough. Within hours, people were organizing and talking, and sharing information in the streets. I met most of my neighbors that week that we had to go without internet access - people I have lived next to for 5 years now, but never had a conversation with. Literally everyone kept to themselves and used MyNextDoor as a proxy for traditional interaction. Also, social media became toxic during this event - False information was spread rapidly in unofficial groups, evacuation orders which were never issued were reported as fact, etc. Our local PD ended up putting out 24x7 hourly updates to stop the flow of bad information. TL;DR: During the October 2017 wildfires, power and internet were out for days -- the "friction" of this event (plus limited access) showed me that people in crisis / who need to organize can't do so via social media alone. Inevitably, small groups of neighbors organized physically to help ea. other out - and the disaster was the catalyst for this. Edit 1 - Added notes on bad parts of social media during natural disaster. PS: Apologies for the length. This was a traumatic event, and verbalizing this here has been therapeutic.
• wpietri 9y ago
  One interesting book in this context is Neiwart's "Alt America". [1] Neiwart is a journalist who spent decades tracking the armed US fringe, including the "patriot" militias, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracists, and white supremacist groups. It's his view that the alt right didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, the low-friction communication of the Internet allowed these formerly scattered, always-falling-apart groups to connect and recruit in ways that were previously impossible. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of the alt-right happened when social media companies in some sense took friction negative. In the world of websites and blogs, you at least had to actively seek the next site, the next writer, the next article. It wasn't much work, but it was at least a little. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were eager to give you an endless stream of content, so as to maximize User Active Minutes metrics. So their algorithms would pull up anything that they thought you'd be interested in. The theory being that any engagement must be good, which implies that total obsession would be best. In retrospect, that theory seems to have some flaws.
  • DanielBMarkham 9y ago
    If you'd like to join me in speculating a bit, let's take an imaginary look at ten years from now. Good news! AI has advanced enough that it is now possible for you to have a customized bot that handles all of the crappy and mundane parts of life: scheduling travel, getting groceries, making sure the house is clean, and so on. The bot learns about you and is able to anticipate your needs. And because we have this tech, we also have bots that will play your emotions like a finely-tuned fiddle. Think Elvis never died? Afraid that lizard-people in the government are controlling your thoughts? Well, now there's a bot that will find others like you and deliver to you a continuous stream of information confirming your beliefs -- and warning you of the dangers lurking out there. Now guess which of these bots makes more money for its creators, the one scheduling airline flights or the one keeping you emotionally-connected with 400 people just like you and making sure that all of you are living a dramatic life on the edge where you're fighting the bad guys?
    • manjushri 9y ago
      So it seems the theory here is that strong AI whose primary objective is to make money is ultimately self destructive?