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I agree with your thesis in general with several nitpicks; > Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is

I agree with your thesis in general with several nitpicks; > Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is honest and necessary work Narrative warfare exists and is not a single agent game. I am not saying this makes narrative shaping defendable, but in the absence of some meaning-making work opportunist opponents will happily fill in the vacuum. This is the slippery slope that escalates to being a true believer of power (ab)use. In the past, opponent processes of meaning-making was between differing, well-paced journalistic outlets somewhat within consilience distance. Today a) the inter-narrative drift is impossibly larger and b) heavily clustered around partisan dimensions which are themselves pushed away and c) comes out of a 24hr infotainment firehose because finances favor that. We're denial-of-service'd out of thinking for ourselves and the narratives we're given are hopelessly irreconcilable. > most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world There is no such cabal of coordinated evil. In fact, this gnostic belief is part of the narrative that creates ressentiment and nihilism. Emergent foolishness can just be as evil. And it can be countered with emergent, distributed wisdom, not necessarily another billions of dollars worth of a "good" platform. > Base reality is, they all make money on selling your attention to advertisers, Selling your attention to advertisers is a relatively minor harm. We are actually pretty good at suppressing noise and get to the signal we want. But the shaping of your attention and emotions that maximize time on site is harmful in a much more durable way. Not only it directly attacks your noise-suppression and relevance-detection heuristics, the more you stay on site the more you're actively trained to be more foolish, reactive and receptive. This bleeds to the rest of your life. It is like an anti-mindfulness training that stupefies you. The solution is bound to be in the form of a suite of counter-trainings that gives back each individual their agency to realize this is not good for us.

raxxorrax 5y ago
There is no Evil Incorporated®, but there are certainly moneyed interests in every major industry and countless examples of more or less directed propaganda campaigns from oil to defense contractors. I agree with the solution though, which shouldn't rely on platform moderation whose customers are advertising and PR. The platforms won't have leverage against their own customers here. This isn't nihilism, nihilism would be ignoring the problem. And on angle to tackle the specific problem of parties wanting to clean up the net in their purpose was the insistence on neutrality and laissez faire moderation. I think it still is the best course but requires education like you suggested.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  There is no Evil Incorporated, nor is there a conspiracy, but when you are a company who has all of them as clients, from energy, chemical, lobbyists, to pharma, defense, and political organizations, it is a who's who of really serious baddies. This is normal, except your business is shaping the attention of children and young people based on the intentions of these organizations. I'm sure the platforms manage their ethics, but this idea that we should trust them with moral authority because they deal with evil more than anyone else should be more suspect. I think it is far more likely that they are compromised by interests than resolute defenders of principle. At the end of the day, social media companies are just euphemistic peddlars of nuanced variations of porn, and a we probably shouldn't be relying on them for judgment on the quality of public discourse. Censorship (to say nothing of the co-ordinated censorship between platforms) is a blunt instrument with a lot of side effects, and people are surely going to start up their own version of something, I'm saying we should think a lot harder about these issues, because we really don't want to be around when people finally get sick of it and start erecting their own platforms.

raxxorrax 5y ago

There is no Evil Incorporated®, but there are certainly moneyed interests in every major industry and countless examples of more or less directed propaganda campaigns from oil to defense contractors. I agree with the solution though, which shouldn't rely on platform moderation whose customers are advertising and PR. The platforms won't have leverage against their own customers here. This isn't nihilism, nihilism would be ignoring the problem. And on angle to tackle the specific problem of parties wanting to clean up the net in their purpose was the insistence on neutrality and laissez faire moderation. I think it still is the best course but requires education like you suggested.

motohagiography 5y ago
There is no Evil Incorporated, nor is there a conspiracy, but when you are a company who has all of them as clients, from energy, chemical, lobbyists, to pharma, defense, and political organizations, it is a who's who of really serious baddies. This is normal, except your business is shaping the attention of children and young people based on the intentions of these organizations. I'm sure the platforms manage their ethics, but this idea that we should trust them with moral authority because they deal with evil more than anyone else should be more suspect. I think it is far more likely that they are compromised by interests than resolute defenders of principle. At the end of the day, social media companies are just euphemistic peddlars of nuanced variations of porn, and a we probably shouldn't be relying on them for judgment on the quality of public discourse. Censorship (to say nothing of the co-ordinated censorship between platforms) is a blunt instrument with a lot of side effects, and people are surely going to start up their own version of something, I'm saying we should think a lot harder about these issues, because we really don't want to be around when people finally get sick of it and start erecting their own platforms.