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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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Relevant resources

Thinking becoming about thinking to harness the power of knowing what you don’t know (YANSS)
youarenotsosmart.com
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A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

‘Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and pol…

Parler Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter - WSJ
www.wsj.com
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Didn't know: "Prominent conservative donor Rebekah Mercer is among the company’s financial backers"Interesting point: one of the main reasons many are on FB/Twitter is to troll other people - will it be harder to get people to come back to an app where everyone agrees with them?

How Some Conservatives Have Switched to Parler, Rumble and Newsmax (FN)
www.nytimes.com
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Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.

Opinion | Facebook serves as an echo chamber, especially for conservatives. Blame its algorithm. - The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com

Summary of peer-reviewed research - “Understanding Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles: The Impact of Social Media on Diversification and Partisan Shifts in News Consumption” - by its authors, who found:more time spent on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes...Facebook usage is five times more polarizing for conservative…

Domestic v. foreign disinformation: A question of timing (US2020 Disinformation news, ed. 4)
medium.com
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There are two possible reasons why we are not talking as much about foreign interference. Both could be true. Only one is good news.

Moral outrage in the digital age (pdf)
static1.squarespace.com

After pointing out the evolutionary reasons for moral outrage's existence - to shame & punish wrongdoers - this 2017 Nature paper describes a psychological framework (triggering stimuli -> Responses -> Outcomes) for understanding how online social networks "change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences?&quo;…

The Biggest Risk to This Election Is Not Russia. It’s Us. - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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"Americans must recognize that the United States is ripe for manipulation. With a month to go before Election Day, we are ripping ourselves apart."Covers ground covered earlier, but with an inside perspective from someone on the National Security Council 2017-2019: "Russian operatives wanted to weaken [Clinton] ... delighted when s…

Why the right-wing has a massive advantage on Facebook - POLITICO
www.politico.com
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"the right is better at connecting with people on a visceral level", according to Facebook, portraying themselves as a neutral mirror. Rightwing content resonates by "speaking to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" by touching on "nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.""This may be true, but it&#x…

Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think?  | The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com
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Literature note: “How to Lose the Information War,” ... on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy...Mueller report: I.R.A.-created groups and accounts reached tens of millions... the troll factory found “authentic, local voices,” to foment large-scale distrust in government and democracy... and managed to get into the heads of powerful politici…

How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing - Vox
www.vox.com
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to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others ... “Deep canvassing,”... “giving them grace.”... to hear someone say something that can be hurtful, ... think about how to ... connect with them...have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen... many communities have a call-out culture... conde…

The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
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The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All | WIRED
www.wired.com
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GPT-3... AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences... imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content ... is produced by machines... adjust, and adapt, to a new level of unreality ...video may turn out to be the easiest to detect ... Politicians will now be able to dismiss real, scandalous vid…

Opinion | The Future of Nonconformity
www.nytimes.com
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marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

Designing social platforms fit for the future
medium.com
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For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

Stop Hate for Profit
www.stophateforprofit.org
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We are asking all businesses ... not advertise on Facebook's services in July.What would you do with $70 billion? We know what Facebook did. They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice... named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” ... turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression ...…

We’re Not Polarized Enough | The New Republic
newrepublic.com
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Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…

A tech exec says history will frown on Zuckerberg and co.
www.fastcompany.com

I put together my own cheat sheet to keep in my back pocket for heated conversations to come

Zuckerberg, Trump and the protests: Facebook’s muddled makeover | Financial Times
www.ft.com
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Facebook is wary of being drawn further into a political argument ahead ... divisive presidential election ... ... steer clear of fact-checking political advertisements... keen not to antagonise Mr Trump ... claiming that social media platforms are biased against Republican ... purely a business decision ... ubiquitous... it must always align with…

Opinion | Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe of ‘Alternative Facts’ - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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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... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

What lessons haven’t we learned since 2016? Lesson 1: RAGE - Stand Up Republic
standuprepublic.com
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The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media... into traditional media... disinformation content is designed to be polarizing... exploits the business models of social media... pointing out that something is false and dangerous ... giving more oxygen to the fire... [Trump] tests and revises purposefull…

Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative
www.niemanlab.org

Despite some evidence that many politically minded people live in partisan echo chambers... strong evidence that encountering information across lines of difference (a) happens and (b) is consequential. split-ticket votes mostly likely by folks who spend some time with news media that reports from a different ideological perspective than their own…

03/02/2020
The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
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echo chambers and filter bubbles are slightly different... echo chambers could be a result of filtering or ... other processes, but filter bubbles have to be the result of algorithmic filtering...people main source of news roughly equal ... online and television... TV is more likely... people over 45. People under 45 are more likely to get their n…

Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
www.niemanlab.org
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our racial, cultural, and religious identities ... overlap with our political identities ... polarization operates on a social — and even primal — level... media executives can now create programming and content that really efficiently checks all the boxes...: political, psychological, racial, cultural, and even aesthetic...Path No. 1: We stay in …

07/01/2020
Internet Deception Is Here to Stay—So What Do We Do Now? | WIRED
www.wired.com
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It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

Opinion | The Media Is Broken - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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journalism primarily do one thing: cover events... The internet has sped up the news cycle. Now we put more emphasis on covering the last event... But ... events in this era have ceased to drive politics...impeachment... Mueller investigation ... “Access Hollywood” tapes... barely leave a trace on the polls...Events don’t seem to be driving politi…

The Stories That Divide Us
www.nytimes.com
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How seeing the other side’s narrative can de-polarize your mind... the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative, but about whether that story is somehow representative... in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once...

30/07/2019
How social media echo chambers fuelled the rise of Boris Johnson
www.theguardian.com
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the bubble machine creates a politics of purity... I am not telling anyone to be mates with racists or stop being leftwing. I am just asking that we be less comfortably numb. The result of not speaking to those who don’t inhabit our precious bubbles will confront us this week

Polarisation and the news media in Europe
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
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report reviews and summarises the recent available literature connecting polarisation and the news media...key findings...: little evidence that increased exposure to news featuring like-minded or opposing views leads to the widespread polarisation of attitudes... some studies found both can strengthen attitudes of minority who already hold stron…

Using social media appears to diversify your news diet, not narrow it » Nieman Journalism Lab
www.niemanlab.org

our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news ... with more politically diverse news diets... The algorithms, of course, continually change... More sources does not necessarily mean more diverse... the majority in most countries and in most groups do not use sources from a…

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