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"He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they're too smart to fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best-and
by textmode 8y ago
"He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they're too smart to fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best-and-brightest are the most likely to fall for it, "because you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.""
What does he mean when he says "check-boxing" and how does that relate to the "implications of social media"?
Does he mean "approval-seeking" and the idea that this is what Facebook uses (e.g. "Like" buttons) to "engage" visitors (while gathering data about their lives, personalities, etc.)?
Anyone have a different read?
- insensible 8y agoI've heard people describe Facebook as basically just filling out a bunch of forms. I take him to mean that we are reducing the rich contours of human experience and interaction to just filling out forms and tapping buttons on a screen.
- sgentle 8y agoIn this case I would read "check-boxing" as "reducing to a simple optimisation loop without considering the implications of what you're optimising for". Granted, I'm doing some pretty heavy interpretational lifting there, but that optimisation loop is something I see as common to productivity, video games, social media, and many other obsessions of the nerdosphere. It feels good to give your optimiser a constant stream of feedback, even if trivial. Of course, now our optimisers are being manipulated by much larger optimisers that run on engagement metrics rather than dopamine. Where did the intuition to build these myopic hyperoptimisers come from? Surely not the same people who grew up minmaxing character attributes or building spreadsheets for optimal daily task efficiency? When you gaze into the optimiser... Weird that we managed to turn society into a GAN.