Overview: Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)

This Overview was my first effort at a Zettelkasten Index to help me prepare for an interview in Trond Undheim's Futurized podcast, as explained here.
Created 5 July 2020.
Key tags: surveillance, polarization.

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Surveillance capitalism & state

So pervasive, difficult to see from the inside. Term coined by Shoshana Zuboff: latest form of capitalism, familiar in some ways, unique in others. From total control over production (industrial capitalism) to: total control over every aspect of everyday life, including what you think:

the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed... traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it.

Profoundly undemocratic and dehumanising. Recast this from privacy issue (we willingly traded for nice things) to realise we're giving up

“decision rights”... fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems...

Not inevitable - technology enables this, but we chose not to regulate it, and the tech giants spend billions lobbying to keep it that way.

This is not just about tech giants - big tech & government:

the twin demons relating to attention... unwanted attention paid to us ... versus our own attention being unwittingly diverted ... living in a Panopticon versus the specter of our personal cognitive resources being fragmented ... by too many competing digital factions that exploit intimate knowledge of their users

Governments rolling out systems to "nudge" us. More data = more effective nudging. Where do you draw the line? Who does it? Who checks/enforces?

"government shouldn’t make up social norms... mislead people for a secondary purpose...

Then throw in augmented reality:

mirrorworld will affect us all at a deeply personal level... severe physiological and psychological effects...to synchronize the virtual ... with the real ... while rendering it visible to millions—will require tracking people and things to a degree that can only be called a total surveillance state

Polarised society

Key linked result: increased polarisation of society. Possibly most important problem: if we can't agree on our problems, or show the slightest respect for each other or the democratic elections we hold, we won't solve any of our problems.

"the US will fracture into something new, unrecognizable, and unstable"

How/Why:

• Social media optimises for outrage because outrage creates engagement
• engagement = you volunteering more data about you
• = more money for surveillance capitalists & control for governments

Regulate all you like: they'll find a way around it, based on behaviour to date. Today's efforts (factchecking, moderation) are small bandaids applied to huge wounds, by the creators of those wounds.

Facebook drives misinformation and radicalization, encourages hate speech, and incites violence... my friends at Facebook have remained true believers

The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media

a platform designed for one result (cannot) be fixed to produce another

When our Feeds are optimised for enragement, politics becomes tribal, creating a perfect environment for disinformation:

"when people... have nonoverlapping lenses, the process by which people make sense of events is more important than the event itself"

social media has the potential to bridge these gaps in ideology, but the way these Facebook discussions take place is ultimately too polarizing and makes others, even witnesses, gun-shy

when people feel they have nowhere trustworthy and independent they can rely on is that they will turn inward ... It then becomes easier for malevolent forces to degrade institutions.

In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent

shortly after the 2016 election, 14 percent of US adults reported sharing a political news story online that they knew at the time was made up

Filter bubbles are still an open question - probably exist, but not equally strong for everyone at all times. Echo chambers created by 'old media' are indisputable, and not new

homogeneous online networks help conspiracy theories persist and grow online.... creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information doesn’t matter.

Facebook and Google... may in fact currently contribute to more diverse news diets... Whether they will still do so after the next algorithm update only they know.

polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least... Trump’s use of Twitter ... setting the agenda for more traditional news outlets, particularly cable news and talk radio.

Death of independent journalism

Above made much worse by another result of these platforms: destruction of independent journalism.

Journalism as we know it a recent phenomenon, financed by bundling journalism with advertising:

the entire egalitarian economy of the post-war 20th century was more historical anomaly than the rule. In 1820 and 1920, we were a deeply unequal society informed by sharply partisan media. Why should 2020 be any different?

Internet, particularly social media, unbundled everything:

• people consume articles in their feed, not entire newspapers (article bundles with a reputation to safeguard)
• increased content supply, with each article looking as professional as the next (credibility signalling broken)
• advertising unbundled onto craigslist and then facebook - newspaper revenue crashed

search engines and social media have blown apart newspapers’ bundles ... an endless stream of items from all over the web ... Peddlers of fake stories have no reputation to maintain and no incentive to stay honest

Some media will thrive with subscriptions, but internet a winner-take-all environment & many may not outlast Trump bump.

• most people cant afford to buy multiple subscriptions, so subscription model will reinforce polarisation.
• most media will disappear without a new business model, particularly local media: good news for local politicians and local crime

Bottom line

In the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democratic societies, unable to solve the challenges we face.

Two paths:

Path No. 1: We stay in our silos, passively allowing media moguls and tech platforms to drag us deeper into our corners... algorithms and micro-targeting mechanisms deliver us belief-confirming disinformation and culturally-divisive tropes... language and packaging that we like best... as our political party preferences increasingly overlap... we find ourselves rage-fueled... a war between a socially constructed us that hates the also-socially constructed them... we will be…ungovernable.
Path No. 2: We actively work to disrupt the infrastructure, logic, and economic model ...

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