In a personal demonstration of the power of posting this week, I ventured into r/neoliberal and left a half-thought-out reply about Chapo that got voted to +100 and then a slightly more thought out reply about Larry Summers' career that made a mod so angry they permabanned me.
"We’ve not even begun to figure out what the ramifications of all this are. I can’t pretend to have the final answer on why exactly we’re so addicted to posting, or what the consequences will be for our culture and our politics. And it’s too large a topic to neatly summarize in a conclusion paragraph. But it’s what I want to explore with the launch of Infinite Scroll, and if you’re as interested in this as I am I hope you’ll subscribe."
I agree with you on not knowing the ramifications of the internet and posting culture will be. I think a lot about something I once heard Sam Harris (other issues aside) say, which was that we are trying to run 21st century software on Stone Age hardware, in terms of our brains not knowing how to cope with the internet.
When I think about the current and future AI adnvancements, I worry about the destruction of humanity and all that, but mostly I get kind of worried about how, like, confusing and disorienting it might be. We already do a shit job at sorting fact from fiction, and that's with current levels of distraction. I was on TikTok for one calendar month before I forced myself off the app because I could feel it eating my attention span alive.
I'm definitely interested in the feeling of 'My attention span is gone' - I feel this sometimes as well, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame it on tech. Probably worth a deeper dive.
Checkout the books Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first has lots of science the second adds some social commentary (albeit a bit partisan). Together they give lots of food for thought
Consider how the information surface of, say, a town has changed from the invention of radio to the full rollout of the internet. Prior to mass media, information was trapped in linearly scaling flows, traveling over roads and rivers to enter a location. Now it travels more or less freely in the 2.5D space we live in, resulting in a multiplicative stepup in the rate at which information crosses more or less any boundary.
That's the difference, I think - we've moved from a context of information scarcity to one of information saturation, and we don't quite know how to handle it or what a reasonable perspective looks like. I actually think the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics you've brought up a couple of times is a sort of half-formed attempt at dealing with this: it is flatly impossible to deal with every moral crisis in the world. Accepting this, we try to stop blaming people for failing to solve problems they are distant from. But without more refinement, we still end up blaming people for accidentally finding themselves in proximity to a problem and not having a perfect solution ready to go.
As the saying now goes "Elon Musk spent 44 billion and all he got was control of all three branches of the federal government". Will the conclusions of this article be re-thought in any way? I doubt it.
I'm commenting a year late but I have to say that while I can't speak much about the Rowling feels so strongly about the trans issue, I've read both of her books you mention and only extremely online people who are marinated in online postings would see them just through that lens. The character you mention in Troubled Blood is a small character (a red herring, who is not even the murderer!). The Ink Black Heart is set in online communities and it makes fun of them, of how seriously online leftists take words, but that's just the setting; it's an old fashioned murder mystery. I think one irony here is that in a post about the perils of posting, you may have taken professional posters at their misleading word when it comes to the content of Rowling's books.
Important topic Jeremiah! 👏Social media algorithms actually hack into powerful evolved brain mechanisms related to group status. People can lose control very quickly. I wrote about that here in case you're interested:
Jonathan Haidt just published a book titled "The anxious generation" reviewing considerable research suggesting that the worsening mental health of children/adolescents can be partially attributed to more screen time and less free play outdoors. The "phone-free schools" movement is taking off big time in the US and UK as a result.
With regard to JK Rowling, I think you buy the left/woke media account of her views too much; as somebody who has actually read all of her Cormoran Strike books, I find your capsule descriptions of two of them to be way off base, and disagreeing with gender ideology is not the same as "hating trans people".
Nevertheless, you do make an accurate point about how deep into the rabbit hole she went on that issue; she didn't start that way, but kept letting herself be dragged further into it. Early on, for the first few years of her involvement in that culture war, this involvement was limited to a handful of tweets and an essay; she seemed to feel she'd said all she needed to and nothing more was necessary. But, apparently driven by the fervent opposition she continued to get even when she was silent, she eventually went off the deep end and is now an avid culture warrior.
She speaks for many, many women who are completely fed up with all this nonsense. All we're asking for is female-only spaces in contexts where that really matters. Being forced to give these up to please any man who decides that he's a woman, or rather, whatever male gaze fantasy of women he has in his mind, is unacceptable.
You can say the same for many kinds of political activists who lived long before the internet. But it's easier to try to psycho-pathologize your enemies than actually engage with their ideas.
I think Johnson's discussion of Musk and Rowling and the damage that social media has done to them is spot on. This is not because they're my "enemies", by any means. I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk; I think he has done more than any single individual to push technological progress in decades. I drive a Tesla, am seriously considering buying a Cybertruck and I'm a SpaceX fanboi and a Starlink user. I have a SpaceX flag ready to fly on my flagpole when the fifth Starship launch is approved.
But it's clear to me that Twitter has broken Musk, just as Yishan predicted (https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938557927854082) it would -- though perhaps not in exactly the way Yishan predicted. It has driven him down a right wing, election-denying, culture-warring rabbit hole which is hurting his (very important) businesses, and turned him paranoid.
I don't care so much either way about Rowling, though I did very much enjoy reading her Harry Potter series with my kids, and I was impressed by her unheard-of financial success. But it seems equally clear that social media has harmed her image, and perhaps her mental health.
Heh. Social media isn't great for me, either. I need to stop posting and get some work done. Sigh.
I think there is an important difference. I don't think buying the newspaper made Ford antisemitic. I think Twitter did make Musk go nuts, or at least heavily contributed to it.
In a personal demonstration of the power of posting this week, I ventured into r/neoliberal and left a half-thought-out reply about Chapo that got voted to +100 and then a slightly more thought out reply about Larry Summers' career that made a mod so angry they permabanned me.
The moral here may be to use more alts.
haha this completely tracks
> The moral here may be to use more alts.
😆😆😆
I landed here from your Balaji’s post https://open.substack.com/pub/infinitescroll/p/how-to-post-your-way-to-a-million?r=2x1rp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post . Both great. Subscribed 🙋♂️
"We’ve not even begun to figure out what the ramifications of all this are. I can’t pretend to have the final answer on why exactly we’re so addicted to posting, or what the consequences will be for our culture and our politics. And it’s too large a topic to neatly summarize in a conclusion paragraph. But it’s what I want to explore with the launch of Infinite Scroll, and if you’re as interested in this as I am I hope you’ll subscribe."
I agree with you on not knowing the ramifications of the internet and posting culture will be. I think a lot about something I once heard Sam Harris (other issues aside) say, which was that we are trying to run 21st century software on Stone Age hardware, in terms of our brains not knowing how to cope with the internet.
When I think about the current and future AI adnvancements, I worry about the destruction of humanity and all that, but mostly I get kind of worried about how, like, confusing and disorienting it might be. We already do a shit job at sorting fact from fiction, and that's with current levels of distraction. I was on TikTok for one calendar month before I forced myself off the app because I could feel it eating my attention span alive.
I'm definitely interested in the feeling of 'My attention span is gone' - I feel this sometimes as well, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame it on tech. Probably worth a deeper dive.
Checkout the books Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first has lots of science the second adds some social commentary (albeit a bit partisan). Together they give lots of food for thought
Thanks for the suggestions, will check these out!
Consider how the information surface of, say, a town has changed from the invention of radio to the full rollout of the internet. Prior to mass media, information was trapped in linearly scaling flows, traveling over roads and rivers to enter a location. Now it travels more or less freely in the 2.5D space we live in, resulting in a multiplicative stepup in the rate at which information crosses more or less any boundary.
That's the difference, I think - we've moved from a context of information scarcity to one of information saturation, and we don't quite know how to handle it or what a reasonable perspective looks like. I actually think the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics you've brought up a couple of times is a sort of half-formed attempt at dealing with this: it is flatly impossible to deal with every moral crisis in the world. Accepting this, we try to stop blaming people for failing to solve problems they are distant from. But without more refinement, we still end up blaming people for accidentally finding themselves in proximity to a problem and not having a perfect solution ready to go.
I do think this is key - the scale of modern social media makes normal social pressures turbocharged, for both better or worse.
As the saying now goes "Elon Musk spent 44 billion and all he got was control of all three branches of the federal government". Will the conclusions of this article be re-thought in any way? I doubt it.
I'm commenting a year late but I have to say that while I can't speak much about the Rowling feels so strongly about the trans issue, I've read both of her books you mention and only extremely online people who are marinated in online postings would see them just through that lens. The character you mention in Troubled Blood is a small character (a red herring, who is not even the murderer!). The Ink Black Heart is set in online communities and it makes fun of them, of how seriously online leftists take words, but that's just the setting; it's an old fashioned murder mystery. I think one irony here is that in a post about the perils of posting, you may have taken professional posters at their misleading word when it comes to the content of Rowling's books.
Important topic Jeremiah! 👏Social media algorithms actually hack into powerful evolved brain mechanisms related to group status. People can lose control very quickly. I wrote about that here in case you're interested:
https://bairdbrightman.substack.com/p/social-media-addiction-as-compulsive
Jonathan Haidt just published a book titled "The anxious generation" reviewing considerable research suggesting that the worsening mental health of children/adolescents can be partially attributed to more screen time and less free play outdoors. The "phone-free schools" movement is taking off big time in the US and UK as a result.
With regard to JK Rowling, I think you buy the left/woke media account of her views too much; as somebody who has actually read all of her Cormoran Strike books, I find your capsule descriptions of two of them to be way off base, and disagreeing with gender ideology is not the same as "hating trans people".
Nevertheless, you do make an accurate point about how deep into the rabbit hole she went on that issue; she didn't start that way, but kept letting herself be dragged further into it. Early on, for the first few years of her involvement in that culture war, this involvement was limited to a handful of tweets and an essay; she seemed to feel she'd said all she needed to and nothing more was necessary. But, apparently driven by the fervent opposition she continued to get even when she was silent, she eventually went off the deep end and is now an avid culture warrior.
She speaks for many, many women who are completely fed up with all this nonsense. All we're asking for is female-only spaces in contexts where that really matters. Being forced to give these up to please any man who decides that he's a woman, or rather, whatever male gaze fantasy of women he has in his mind, is unacceptable.
It's almost as if J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk don't care that you disapprove of them. Real psychological issue that.
but see here's the thing. they are OBSESSED with whether people agree with their pet causes.
You can say the same for many kinds of political activists who lived long before the internet. But it's easier to try to psycho-pathologize your enemies than actually engage with their ideas.
I think Johnson's discussion of Musk and Rowling and the damage that social media has done to them is spot on. This is not because they're my "enemies", by any means. I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk; I think he has done more than any single individual to push technological progress in decades. I drive a Tesla, am seriously considering buying a Cybertruck and I'm a SpaceX fanboi and a Starlink user. I have a SpaceX flag ready to fly on my flagpole when the fifth Starship launch is approved.
But it's clear to me that Twitter has broken Musk, just as Yishan predicted (https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938557927854082) it would -- though perhaps not in exactly the way Yishan predicted. It has driven him down a right wing, election-denying, culture-warring rabbit hole which is hurting his (very important) businesses, and turned him paranoid.
I don't care so much either way about Rowling, though I did very much enjoy reading her Harry Potter series with my kids, and I was impressed by her unheard-of financial success. But it seems equally clear that social media has harmed her image, and perhaps her mental health.
Heh. Social media isn't great for me, either. I need to stop posting and get some work done. Sigh.
Henry Ford was the same way: he bought a newspaper and distributed it everywhere to promote his anti-Semetic conspiracy theories.
I think there is an important difference. I don't think buying the newspaper made Ford antisemitic. I think Twitter did make Musk go nuts, or at least heavily contributed to it.