Reject Algorithmic Media!
Your life is being stolen from you.
This post originally appeared on Midwest Socialist. It has been edited for a wider audience.
Your life is being stolen from you, second by second and day by day.
The old forces of Capital and the new giants of Tech have entered into an alliance set upon the squandering of human experience in a manner and at a scale unfamiliar to history. So far, they're winning.
Not content with merely the dictatorial control of our working lives and the controlling of our behavior via incentives, they now endeavor to subordinate our every thought to their whims and our very understanding of the world to processes they alone shape. They seek to be the facilitators of all discussion, the arbiters of all ideas, the sole authority in the shaping of the mind.
Their weapon of choice is “algorithmic media”— platforms in which content is delivered not by user curation but instead by fiendishly effective curation models, these platforms having largely replaced and/ or arisen from traditional “social media”.
While inscrutable and complex, these models are shaped and optimized for the interests of the platform owners, formed by directives to increase engagement time and engagement intensity. Bluntly, the ruling class has devised an evolving machine with which it can squander human life and control the human mind. As this machine perfects itself it squeezes away more and more of our lives. Over the last decades it has utterly consumed us.
Our lived experience is zero-sum. Every moment spent on these platforms is a moment not spent with family, creating art, improving oneself, or, indeed, fighting for a better future.
When there is a ubiquitous source of instant, endless, “dopamine”, the opportunity cost of doing literally anything else becomes higher relatively. This means every meeting or gathering, no matter what kind, must go on with the background of each participant fighting the urge to pull out their phone and be mindlessly entertained. As social creatures, this means the interactions we require to live full lives are constantly, incessantly, cheapened and muted by algorithmic media.
Today, every task we seek to complete must compete directly for time and attention with precisely targeted rage-bait, goon-bait, bad faith, and advertising, a deluge of maximally stimulating information that our brains are wholly unequipped to handle.
Being constantly buffeted by such content has a strange dual effect familiar to all of us, a sort of pacified rage, a despair without definite cause or real depth, the result of being thrown back and forth between the extremes of emotion every few seconds.
The ultimate goal of increasing engagement time and intensity of emotional response in mind, even attempts towards good-faith discussion are shown to the two groups most likely to respond strongly: those who already agree and those who will be enraged. That is, your ideas, when posted online, are shown to the groups where they will have the least impact!
It is tempting then, to believe that algorithmic media can be useful “in your bubble”, among like-minded people. This conclusion underestimates the distortions inherent to the medium. As a rule, curation algorithms punish heavily any content that causes the user to leave the app. Longer posts do this, the pause necessary to engage giving the brain a chance to return to reality and opt out of further scrolling. Posts that link outside of the app, be it a call to action, an event signup, or simply to source information (as is necessary in informed debate) are suppressed most of all.
The force of the algorithm thus pushes essays towards paragraphs, paragraphs towards blurbs, and blurbs to mere slogans. These slogans in some respects may reflect correct ideas, but are only understood as such by those familiar with the underlying reasoning, the forces at play, and the conditions in which the idea is formed. Outside of this context these slogans readily strawman themselves and can be wielded as a cudgel by the right to alienate potential allies. At worst, these slogans take on a life of their own, leading astray decision-making and eroding all nuance. Instead of making your ideas accessible to a wider audience you risk debasing interesting ideas to vagaries.
Democracy unavoidably requires an informed, passionate, and intellectual society. Without it, our politics will necessarily veer into authoritarianism. If we want a better world we must build this society, day by day and brick by brick creating the seeds of a new coalition.
We face this task in an environment in which vast rivers of money are flowing in the opposite direction, sweeping the public away from democracy and towards ignorance and isolation.
We each have a duty to enthusiastically learn and understand the world around us, advancing causes that we believe can make positive change. This is essentially impossible without the ability to read and digest long texts. We must raise our understanding of society beyond thought-terminating cliches and dogmatic subordination to a party line. As Hegel write in the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit,
“For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came out…
The true shape in which Truth exists can only be the scientific system of truth… only the systematic exposition of philosophy itself provides [Truth].
Knowledge is only True when it is systematized, when taken together with the process that brought about that knowledge. How can we truly understand anything if we can only think in short phrases? How can we make informed decisions when inundated with emotionally charged screeds every second of the day? Bluntly, we cannot. That’s what they’re counting on.
All this is worsened by the inherent flaws of a written medium-- lack of conversational context and body language clues, alienation from the other participants, the difficulty of conveying ideas in text in he first place.
The discourse on algorithmic media platforms thus necessarily devolves into people parroting slogans that are understood by neither the author or the reader, the most shrill and irritating examples being lifted up and circulated while any conversation of value is suppressed. This is not a failure of anyone’s ideas or any particular movement. It is not a reflection of “who we are” or even who our ideological opponents are. It is a circus in which we are all both the clowns and the audience.
Of course infighting and fragmentation happen on these platforms, they are literally designed to divide and enrage! They draw us into endless, pointless, sideshows. They exhaust our spirit and attack our unity. They undermine our solidarity and convince us of lies. They deprive us of the most essential element of organizing, human to human connection, where ideas can be discussed without interference.
Walking away can be daunting, but you can take the first step today.
Short form video is the most powerful stimulant and the hardest to kick. Set screen time limits and have a friend or partner set the unlock code. You can gradually reduce the time or go cold turkey. Try getting in the habit of turning your phone completely off and setting it physically away from you. For the genuinely social uses of platforms like Instagram (posts about upcoming events, keeping tabs on distant friends), restrict your use to a laptop or desktop computer. You do not need it accessible on your phone at all times.
If nothing else, stop arguing online. You are wasting your capacity and your energy, allowing the framing of debate to be undermined in ways that lead to incorrect conclusions. Take those discussions to community events, to your your friends and family, to political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. The issues of our day are too important to be confined to a screen and too complex to fit in a character limit.
Wean yourself off the digital ketamine of algorithmic media and tasks that once sounded impossible will become invigorating. Every part of your life can be richer, your brain quieter, your focus deeper, your time spent on the pursuits that matter to you. Today can be the day you take the first step towards that goal.
Let us throw off the yoke of so-called “social media” and burn it in the fires of intellectualism! Do not let yourself be controlled by our enemies, do not undermine your own thinking by subordinating yourself to the tools of the billionaire class! A better world lies ahead, let us forge the path together.