industrialising ourselves crazy

the clarity that comes with faster cycles

Sometimes, a process is difficult to understand when it happens gradually, but becomes much clearer when the cycle is sped up. That’s why the fathers of genetics did experiments on fruit flies and peas, rather than Galapagos tortoises. And I think that the advent of social media might have a clarifying effect on one of the hoary old questions of media studies.

Does the media shape politics? Can it? Or does it only look that way because the media tries to reflect its audience’s already existing preferences back to it? It’s hard to believe that this was once something that was a matter which people seriously debated, back when we were worrying about the disastrous effect and huge unaccountable power of tabloid newspapers and talk radio. More innocent days.

When the feedback loop is accelerated, the process is obvious; the two options are not mutually exclusive and in fact one of them is an input into another. Most of the time, the media reflects people’s prejudices back toward them, developing a kind of feedback loop that’s somewhat bad in itself. From time to time, this feedback loop can be exploited by someone who wants to manipulate preferences by injecting their own material into the process – then the feedback takes over as people actually seem to like more and more of what they’ve already been shown.

I think what we previously missed was the idea that if preferences are in any way malleable at all, then the simple activity of “just” pandering to existing prejudices wasn’t in any way neutral – it’s actually potentially really bad, as we are seeing now in the algorithmic age. I am still worried by the William Burroughs quote I was talking about a few years ago.

“The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”.

And the other lesson of the algorithmic social media age is that industrialisation matters – the speeding up of the cycle doesn’t just clarify things analytically, it actually intensifies the damaging effects. Chris Hayes’ book “The Siren’s Call” is very good on this subject – it goes through a lot of evidence that people’s judgement is made a lot worse by the state of constant low-level cognitive exhaustion created by the attention economy.

I feel like this stuff is all going to have to be regulated some day, in ways that will look like very draconian restrictions on free speech. It’s happened before – the Cancer Act 1939 makes it absolutely illegal to make certain kinds of medical claims to the public in the UK, whether they can be scientifically backed or not.