I used to think anti-consumerism was a lot more popular. It’s a significant disconnect from how I thought people are. Apparently I took more media related courses in high school and university than most people do.
One thing that continued to confuse me is how tech cultures are unrepentantly consumer capitalists. The earlier times of the world wide web was very counter-culture. So it’s been an unending source of befuddlement how tech nerds have been deep-throating the adtech boot.
This kind of work now pays hundreds per hour. They verify credentials of course.
I haven’t looked at Discord since December after getting into an argument. So perfect timing I guess.
The platform is ass anyways. Monetized features everywhere.
Reddit is State Department agitprop. This leak is probably a tiny fraction of their operations on reddit.
It’s crazy how successful that platform is because nobody suspects it. Redditors all hate the other social media platforms. They cannot fathom that reddit is just as bad or worse.
But why is that. Is it the illusion of control. Because ostensibly its a user curated site. Because they think they have voting power. All of these things have proven to be completely false time and again. Yet the illusion of reddit persists.
Pretty much what people already know by now. Algorithms find optimal ways to manipulate you.
The two ingredients are data and a way to measure the thing you’re trying to optimize. Machine learning is used to find optimal ways to keep people engaged in internet platforms. In other words they’re like designer drugs.
Worse than designer drugs. They’re continuously self optimizing because they keep measuring the results and making adjustments so the result stays optimal. As long as they have a continuous feed of recent data, the algorithm evolves to find the optimal solution.
That’s why recklessly giving away your personal data is dangerous. Let’s say the system notices you’ve been spending 1 microsecond less time engaged in screen time. The system will adjust to make sure they’ve reclaimed that 1 microsecond of your day.
It will show you things that tend to keep you engaged. How does it know that? Because you give it the data it needs to measure what keeps you online more. That data is based on every interaction with your phone or computer which is logged.
It’s worse than substance abuse because you never develop a tolerance. If you do then the algorithm has already adapted to find the next thing that keeps you engaged in the most optimal way.
It’s not just engagement. It’s whatever target you want to optimize for. As long as you have the two ingredients. Data and metrics.
That’s why data is called the new oil. Or was it gold rush? I can’t remember. It’s been called this since the early 2000s maybe.
LLM AI isn’t so scary when you know that they’ve been using AI against us for a very long time already. If more of the world understood all this better, we’d all have quit to study poetry already.