I spent decades on social media, right from the very beginning, and in that time, watched them drift from exciting virtual communities into soulless commercial marketplaces. What finally drove me away wasn’t a single post or policy change - it was recognizing the slow erosion they’ve inflicted on how we think, and how we treat each other.
You know that AI Apocalypse we’ve all been dreading? Turns out it wasn’t algorithmic intelligence we should have been worried about - algorithmic greed will do the job long before real AI ergos its first cogito sum.
Social media algorithms are incredibly efficient, endlessly patient, never sleeping, never blinking, always attentive traffic control supervisors in the online abattoir of human attention. You go in human, only to have your attention baited by whatever depraved cocktail of outrage and salaciousness works best on you, and you stay there, milked to exhaustion, and then spit out long enough to feed yourself and urinate before you’re back at the entrance again, jonesing for your next fix. All your capacity for grace and nuance in human interaction is bombarded, overwhelmed, and beaten into submission by this non-stop affront to your organs of empathy. Is it any wonder that by the time we emerge back into the world, we have no patience or tolerance left for each other?
It’s not the billionaire oligarchs raking in the dollars that disturb me. It’s the back-splatter of our human compassion they leave dripping from the walls and pooling on the floors of the abattoir as a valueless byproduct in the process. Our dignity has no dollar value, so it is absolutely invisible to the machines that milk us - and to their masters.
Well, I’m tired of being milked. I’m tired of watching my fellow citizens succumb to the stresses of an increasingly irrational world, drained of the very facilities that would help them cope, all because the robots haven’t been programmed to give a shit about the effluent staining their precious equipment.
That’s not effluent - that’s our humanity!
Anyway, I no longer participate in any communications platform that uses algorithms to filter which part of the content library I see and therefore who I should be hating today. If you want to chat, find me here. Or on Wikipedia’s experimental social network, TrustCafe, which is over here.
Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.
Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?
Welcome to the new Creativity Hacker. If you remember the old site, things will look very different this time around, but there’s method beneath the madness. Follow me down below the fold to find out how I’m organizing things this time around. And more importantly, why.
The more time I put into getting this new site ready, the more possibilities I see for turning it into my central (and only) communications portal. But could this be more? Could this finally be an end to the demon of my “telescoping effort” conundrum?