The Tyranny of Endless Feeds
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| Image by Pixabay |
"I am sorry". These are the words uttered by the CEO of the biggest social network on our planet during the congressional hearing. Mark Zuckerberg was apologizing for not being 'careful enough' with the private data of Facebook's users which led to Cambridge Analytica scandal. Chris Huges, the co-founder of Facebook, thinks that Facebook has become too powerful and should be dismantled. Chris Wetherell regrets building the retweet button and compares it with 'handing over a loaded gun to a 4 year old' while Ethan Zuckerman feels guilty for coding the first pop-up ad on the internet. Some of the famous designers in the silicon valley like Nir Eyal who preach how to build habit forming websites, go great lengths to avoid getting addicted to their own designs as if drug dealers are abstaining themselves from 'doing their own stuff'. It's not very hard to see why these architects of our digital-scape are feeling sorry for. Our data is the harvest of these websites, online privacy is a myth we all believe in, our opinions are easily swayed, misinformation easily spread, truth easily smothered and we are trapped in our echo chambers by its intrinsic design. None of this was intentional, of course, but it somehow led to this situation. Now that the techno-optimism about the ICTs (Information and communication technologies) has finally faded, it's time for a reality check.
At the beginning of internet era, a connected world promised free flow of information, re-connection to lost friends and transition of power back into the hands of people through democratization. The companies in their nascent stages had to adopt a business model to sustain themselves. After struggling with various business models the one which succeeded was the ad-supported. Investors paid millions to find what the users wanted in order to display pervasive ads. To increase the efficacy of the mechanism, more and more personal data was and is being collected. Facebook and Google kept on acquiring new startups to cull the competition and establish dominance in the data economy. Back in 2017, a report by a Facebook executive to its customer (not us, the advertising agencies) was leaked in Australia. It claimed that Facebook's algorithm is capable of predicting user's mood which it uses to determine when to show what in order to maximize the impact of the 'personalized content’. All of this only works if the users keep coming back to the websites. Mobile applications became another medium for the tech giants to cash on the trend and with advent of push notifications, all hell broke loose. Ever since we are living in a constant state of distraction. 87% of us start the day by checking our phones. We even check our phones just out of boredom. A study shows that people are distracted by mere presence of a smartphone in the same room even when it's switched off. That's why the current state of social media is termed as the 'attention economy' which competes to grab our attention, often aggressively, by bombarding sensationalizing content, click baits and puppy videos and in order to keep us trapped in their endless feeds. As the decade progressed, people started noticing downsides of the connected worlds. Physiological and psychological effects were being more and more apparent. One of my friend conducted a survey for her academic project very recently. Her findings offer us a few insights into technogenic problems. To name a few, 76% of the respondents were always distracted, 56% of them sought social acceptance through ‘likes and hearts’, 41 % of them had body image issues, 63% were suffering from headaches and strained eyes, sleep patterns of 83% of them were disturbed and about half of the respondents were struggling with loneliness despite of having hundreds of social media friends. We surely did enjoy the rosy hues of the tech in the beginning but they slowly turned grey.
I remember feeling irked by the ubiquitous presence of at least a dozen CCTV cameras on every nook and corner of Shanghai. I recently read about how Chinese private tech companies were helping the State to build and deploy a Social Credit System, a metric of social trustworthiness, which is being run on trial basis and not made public yet. I discussed this topic with one of my Chinese mentor-cum-friend and he was quite onboard with the whole idea. "If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear." This is a fallacious argument. Of course, the SCS tells us how 'Good' or 'Bad'-behaved a person is by taking into consideration his/her online activities, credit behavior, purchase history etc. But the definition of 'Good' or 'Bad' is ethereal and when it's tweaked for the gain of a particular entity, for example an authoritarian state, reality can be a far cry from the original intentions. It can also be used to identify potential threats to the state's interests which may or may not always align with the public interest. Besides, it can potentially reduce all human interaction to artificial niceties just to maintain high SCS (I recommend watching Black Mirror S03E01: Nosedive to get this concept better). All of this is made possible only by wide scaled surveillance and India still has a lot to catch up to. But then again I realized that we are already being surveilled by the tech giants in the Silicon Valley so that they can show us 'personalized' ads. Facebook reminds us about the birthdays of our loved ones, Google decides which news is suitable for us and which isn't, keeps track of our online and offline activities (Location data), Instagram bombards with the ads about the things we just checked on Amazon or flipkart, Alexa listens to all of our conversations, Twitter knows about our political leanings, Quora knows our expertise and interests, Tinder knows our facial preferences better than ourselves and Pornhub hides away our darkest fantasies. All of this information is vital to our individuality and it can be easily weaponized against us. I am not being cynical here, there are plenty of cybercrime precedence.
In the late 2000s, twitter was the platform used by the protesters during Iranian revolution and Arab spring movement to organize resistance against the tyrants. The silicon valley or tech world in general was rejoiced but soon 'the other side' caught on which led to significant Socio-political ramifications in the late 2010s. They were shaking the very foundation of democracies throughout the world. That being said social media has evolved into one of the best tool to spread political propaganda. All sides of the political spectrum are effectively employing a new kind of politics called Algorithmic Politics, targeted towards ‘specific randoms’ as in targeted towards a specific group but randomly as in irrespective of the individuality of the targeted person. Ramifications of this kind of politics range from inconspicuous sounding online trolling all the way to mob lynchings and mass shootings. Facebook and twitter were used to sway public opinions during 2016 US presidential election campaign and Brexit. According to an analysis done by Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer, search results were six time more favorable to Trump than to Clinton during the six months period leading to elections. Facebook was used as an instrument to circulate the extremist propaganda in Myanmar against the Rohingyas. Unlike the print media propaganda, the link between perpetrators and the victims is tenuous and cannot be easily established in algorithm based personalized propaganda. The fact that some key words can be purchased from search engines for higher cost and indexed higher in the search results with whatever the content you want out there, makes it one of the most effective way to push forth the false or misleading narratives. This machinery is running round the clock dumping anxieties in the public spheres in order to create confusion and general mistrust. That is why flat-earthers and climate change deniers can still cling onto their worldviews. Unfortunately, the same algorithms lead individuals into their own echo chambers and filter bubbles. This results in the ideological isolation, stymies the dialogue and widens the gulf between opposing viewpoints. In serious turns of events, this can gradually lead to bigotry, chauvinisms, hate speech and phobias which provide perfect recipe for unleashing tyranny. As Plato observed 24 centuries ago,
India just went through an episode of public confusion and a mini-social-turmoil in the backdrop of CAA. Social media was inundated with all kinds of opinions, claims, accusations and anxieties. I was constantly correcting my friends who were broadcasting partial or wrong information and at the same time I was alleviating fears of my family members. Mass confusion was sabotaging any meaningful dialogue. So I dug deeper through legal and historical premises of CAA. I went through all the official and public information available on ASSAM NRC portal. I studied merits of Pro and Anti CAA arguments made by our elected representatives. All of this just to make sure that I don't fall prey to the propaganda of any political actors. When I saw some of the highly educated people whom I personally knew were sharing extreme views and false information all over their social media feeds and statuses, the casualties of an ideological warfare, I simply felt sorry for our collective future. Adverse Physiological and psychological effects of the technology can be reversed and curbed by adopting few strategies, counseling and self-discipline but socio-political crisis induced by rampant technology is deleterious and beyond individual control.
So what can we do or can we really do anything about it? When I was thinking about writing this essay, my intentions were not to convince readers to give up the technology. It was exactly the opposite. Needless to mention its usefulness, the tech has become an indispensable aspect of our lives and abandoning it is simply impractical. However paradoxical it may sound, I used the very tech to do my research I am ranting about here in a bid to spread the awareness. Neither can we trade our convenience, nor are we ready to pay for the services we use in exchange for the perfect data privacy. So, our lives are always going to be exposed up to some degree. Luckily, legislative bodies are taking cognizance of the issue and are calling for the regulation of online world. EU piloted the project and ratified the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018. A similar bill was proposed in our parliament last year. Also, tech companies have committed to enforce self-regulation in the wake of recent scandals and hefty fines slapped by various consumer courts for breaching the competition laws. On individual level, we can take steps to protect ourselves from the prying eyes with malicious intents. For starters, we can go and take a look at our privacy settings and limit what everyone can see. Now, more than ever, we have sources to check the facts and keep ourselves well informed so that our prejudices won't overpower our reasoning. We can try to break out of our echo chambers by just entertaining opposing viewpoints. We can take a step back and think before circulating any information online and be wary of any biased content. It will surely take some time to heal the damage already done but the original cause of the internet is not entirely lost. The #metoo movement and recent climate change activism were the testimonies to it. The internet is still relatively younger compared to other technologies. We ought to give it a second chance.
At the beginning of internet era, a connected world promised free flow of information, re-connection to lost friends and transition of power back into the hands of people through democratization. The companies in their nascent stages had to adopt a business model to sustain themselves. After struggling with various business models the one which succeeded was the ad-supported. Investors paid millions to find what the users wanted in order to display pervasive ads. To increase the efficacy of the mechanism, more and more personal data was and is being collected. Facebook and Google kept on acquiring new startups to cull the competition and establish dominance in the data economy. Back in 2017, a report by a Facebook executive to its customer (not us, the advertising agencies) was leaked in Australia. It claimed that Facebook's algorithm is capable of predicting user's mood which it uses to determine when to show what in order to maximize the impact of the 'personalized content’. All of this only works if the users keep coming back to the websites. Mobile applications became another medium for the tech giants to cash on the trend and with advent of push notifications, all hell broke loose. Ever since we are living in a constant state of distraction. 87% of us start the day by checking our phones. We even check our phones just out of boredom. A study shows that people are distracted by mere presence of a smartphone in the same room even when it's switched off. That's why the current state of social media is termed as the 'attention economy' which competes to grab our attention, often aggressively, by bombarding sensationalizing content, click baits and puppy videos and in order to keep us trapped in their endless feeds. As the decade progressed, people started noticing downsides of the connected worlds. Physiological and psychological effects were being more and more apparent. One of my friend conducted a survey for her academic project very recently. Her findings offer us a few insights into technogenic problems. To name a few, 76% of the respondents were always distracted, 56% of them sought social acceptance through ‘likes and hearts’, 41 % of them had body image issues, 63% were suffering from headaches and strained eyes, sleep patterns of 83% of them were disturbed and about half of the respondents were struggling with loneliness despite of having hundreds of social media friends. We surely did enjoy the rosy hues of the tech in the beginning but they slowly turned grey.
I remember feeling irked by the ubiquitous presence of at least a dozen CCTV cameras on every nook and corner of Shanghai. I recently read about how Chinese private tech companies were helping the State to build and deploy a Social Credit System, a metric of social trustworthiness, which is being run on trial basis and not made public yet. I discussed this topic with one of my Chinese mentor-cum-friend and he was quite onboard with the whole idea. "If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear." This is a fallacious argument. Of course, the SCS tells us how 'Good' or 'Bad'-behaved a person is by taking into consideration his/her online activities, credit behavior, purchase history etc. But the definition of 'Good' or 'Bad' is ethereal and when it's tweaked for the gain of a particular entity, for example an authoritarian state, reality can be a far cry from the original intentions. It can also be used to identify potential threats to the state's interests which may or may not always align with the public interest. Besides, it can potentially reduce all human interaction to artificial niceties just to maintain high SCS (I recommend watching Black Mirror S03E01: Nosedive to get this concept better). All of this is made possible only by wide scaled surveillance and India still has a lot to catch up to. But then again I realized that we are already being surveilled by the tech giants in the Silicon Valley so that they can show us 'personalized' ads. Facebook reminds us about the birthdays of our loved ones, Google decides which news is suitable for us and which isn't, keeps track of our online and offline activities (Location data), Instagram bombards with the ads about the things we just checked on Amazon or flipkart, Alexa listens to all of our conversations, Twitter knows about our political leanings, Quora knows our expertise and interests, Tinder knows our facial preferences better than ourselves and Pornhub hides away our darkest fantasies. All of this information is vital to our individuality and it can be easily weaponized against us. I am not being cynical here, there are plenty of cybercrime precedence.
In the late 2000s, twitter was the platform used by the protesters during Iranian revolution and Arab spring movement to organize resistance against the tyrants. The silicon valley or tech world in general was rejoiced but soon 'the other side' caught on which led to significant Socio-political ramifications in the late 2010s. They were shaking the very foundation of democracies throughout the world. That being said social media has evolved into one of the best tool to spread political propaganda. All sides of the political spectrum are effectively employing a new kind of politics called Algorithmic Politics, targeted towards ‘specific randoms’ as in targeted towards a specific group but randomly as in irrespective of the individuality of the targeted person. Ramifications of this kind of politics range from inconspicuous sounding online trolling all the way to mob lynchings and mass shootings. Facebook and twitter were used to sway public opinions during 2016 US presidential election campaign and Brexit. According to an analysis done by Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer, search results were six time more favorable to Trump than to Clinton during the six months period leading to elections. Facebook was used as an instrument to circulate the extremist propaganda in Myanmar against the Rohingyas. Unlike the print media propaganda, the link between perpetrators and the victims is tenuous and cannot be easily established in algorithm based personalized propaganda. The fact that some key words can be purchased from search engines for higher cost and indexed higher in the search results with whatever the content you want out there, makes it one of the most effective way to push forth the false or misleading narratives. This machinery is running round the clock dumping anxieties in the public spheres in order to create confusion and general mistrust. That is why flat-earthers and climate change deniers can still cling onto their worldviews. Unfortunately, the same algorithms lead individuals into their own echo chambers and filter bubbles. This results in the ideological isolation, stymies the dialogue and widens the gulf between opposing viewpoints. In serious turns of events, this can gradually lead to bigotry, chauvinisms, hate speech and phobias which provide perfect recipe for unleashing tyranny. As Plato observed 24 centuries ago,
'Against chaotic backgrounds, the tyrant emerges as a protector of the people against “drones” (the plague of an inactive class taking advantage of democracy) and against the excesses of freedom. However, the protector eventually converts into an autocratic ruler.He further described the tyrant's mechanism to use the chaos which can abuse the power of ICTs in contemporary world.
First, the tyrant has a mob entirely at his disposal. Second, he uses false accusation as his favorite method. Third, he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
(Plato by Badiou Alain, 2006, p. 566)Twitter handle of Donald Trump is the perfect example of this mechanism. The gradual degradation of democratic ethos around the globe has unfortunately coincided with the rise of internet era. Now, information travels at unprecedented speed, so does the misinformation.
India just went through an episode of public confusion and a mini-social-turmoil in the backdrop of CAA. Social media was inundated with all kinds of opinions, claims, accusations and anxieties. I was constantly correcting my friends who were broadcasting partial or wrong information and at the same time I was alleviating fears of my family members. Mass confusion was sabotaging any meaningful dialogue. So I dug deeper through legal and historical premises of CAA. I went through all the official and public information available on ASSAM NRC portal. I studied merits of Pro and Anti CAA arguments made by our elected representatives. All of this just to make sure that I don't fall prey to the propaganda of any political actors. When I saw some of the highly educated people whom I personally knew were sharing extreme views and false information all over their social media feeds and statuses, the casualties of an ideological warfare, I simply felt sorry for our collective future. Adverse Physiological and psychological effects of the technology can be reversed and curbed by adopting few strategies, counseling and self-discipline but socio-political crisis induced by rampant technology is deleterious and beyond individual control.
So what can we do or can we really do anything about it? When I was thinking about writing this essay, my intentions were not to convince readers to give up the technology. It was exactly the opposite. Needless to mention its usefulness, the tech has become an indispensable aspect of our lives and abandoning it is simply impractical. However paradoxical it may sound, I used the very tech to do my research I am ranting about here in a bid to spread the awareness. Neither can we trade our convenience, nor are we ready to pay for the services we use in exchange for the perfect data privacy. So, our lives are always going to be exposed up to some degree. Luckily, legislative bodies are taking cognizance of the issue and are calling for the regulation of online world. EU piloted the project and ratified the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018. A similar bill was proposed in our parliament last year. Also, tech companies have committed to enforce self-regulation in the wake of recent scandals and hefty fines slapped by various consumer courts for breaching the competition laws. On individual level, we can take steps to protect ourselves from the prying eyes with malicious intents. For starters, we can go and take a look at our privacy settings and limit what everyone can see. Now, more than ever, we have sources to check the facts and keep ourselves well informed so that our prejudices won't overpower our reasoning. We can try to break out of our echo chambers by just entertaining opposing viewpoints. We can take a step back and think before circulating any information online and be wary of any biased content. It will surely take some time to heal the damage already done but the original cause of the internet is not entirely lost. The #metoo movement and recent climate change activism were the testimonies to it. The internet is still relatively younger compared to other technologies. We ought to give it a second chance.
-The.Lazy.Philosopher
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