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Jaron Lanier, an eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist, is no stranger to skepticism around social media, but his current interpretations of its effects are becoming darker and his warnings more trenchant.
Lanier, a dreadlocked free-thinker credited with coining the term “virtual reality”, has long sounded dire sirens about the dangers of a world over-reliant on the internet and at the increasing mercy of tech lords, their social media platforms and those who work for them. He says that “We’re putting the fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation.
The exaggerated focus on Twitter in recent months after its chaotic take over by billionaire Elon Musk follows longstanding concerns about Facebook and others, including state actors. He mentions “psychological operatives” working for Vladimir Putin and the Chinese communist state apparatus. All of them are filtering or promoting information for their own gains. In short, the web is not a free market of information as originally envisioned. It is a gamed system being rampantly abused.
Lanier helped create modern ideologies – Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, among them. But he is no longer a fan of how the digital utopia is coming along. He’s called it “digital Maoism” and accused tech giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies”. And he’s been brutally clear about what he sees as the consequences of over-dependence on social media: in essence, you’ll get both popular cat videos and civil war.
Lanier has “observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot”. He singled out people who have recently been in the news: Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Ye (Kanye West). Once distinct personalities, he wrote, each had “veered into being bratty little boys” in their public behavior – a result perhaps of being “Twitter poisoned”, a more contemporary term for operant* conditioning.
“I have noticed that all these people converge on a similar personality type that wasn’t present before. If that has something to do with social media addictions, or Twitter poisoning, what is that?” he wrote.
Coming from someone who has over the years described himself as “worried optimist”, his interpretations come with weight.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved. Powered by Vanilla
Comments
@Anna- You must be listening in to our dinner table conversations. And we don't even have Alexa or Siri. You must be CIA or NSA. Stop that!
Almost unbelievable but true: Some years ago I had mowed about half of the large backyard up at our weekend place, ran out of energy, and left the rest until the next day.
I left my earcover headset hanging on on the lawnmower handle.
The next day I went to finish up the mowing, put on the headset, and a few minutes later felt something crawling around in my ear. Yes- overnight a couple of earwigs had crawled into the earcovers and were now crawling around in my ear. I damn near fainted.
You can safely bet that ever since I've really checked those earcovers before putting on that thing.
Tiny flying robot bees are being built to pollinate crops
A complete and unedited section of a current report in the San Francisco Chronicle