I am inclined to the think that the internet is more and more filled with patterns that exploit the "weaknesses" of the human mind. My Youtube suggestions often include video shorts of scantily clad women in very suggestive postures (the videos have millions of view counts). That's hacking the male mind...
Yeah, I think the process of socializing, especially in person, leverages some kind of hardware acceleration that we all have and counteracts these gaps in our security, but the moment people get online all of a sudden all that biology just goes out the window.
Just imagine, for example, the in-person equivalent of a YT conspiracy video. It would be some motor-mouth at a party who traps you in a corner to tell you all about how the field of archaeology is an elaborate hoax meant to keep us from finding out the "truth". You would basically smile and node, or maybe even humor them for a second, but the moment you get a whiff that there is an unlimited stream of this stuff you would look for the nearest exit.
Videos that play on people's insecurities would just be that friend in your group who's the emotional vampire, that always requires a tag team to manage.
And yet, as soon as these personalities take their form online, we find them interesting, irresistible even. Like, "But, this guy says that giants used to walk the earth and the fact that all pyramids look the same can't be just a coincidence.", and the next thing you know you find a community among others and some people get completely swallowed by one grift or another.
I guess this kind of thing has been happening for a while too, with TV, it's just become a lot more effective now with networked computers.
Worth pointing out that modern social media is built on maximum-engagement, more-of-the-same recommendation algorithms that are a perfect fit for spreading these kinds of content. If you're unaware of this and interact with it, you'll soon be made to feel (by the algorithm) like everyone on Youtube or Twitter is talking about it.
IRL I can read if my words offended or if you're confused and I can clarify. There is facial expressions, body language, and intonation. Even if someone isn't speaking they are sending signals about how the information was received. The information content is dwarfed by this "metadata". IRL you can be sure the person speaking is a human being. This is all so automatic that we take it for granted as window dressing that isn't important when in fact it's most important.
I had the same thought but it goes beyond the internet: A surprisingly large amount of all human economic activity is around exploiting other people's psyche/biology. And then we wonder why everything is so broken. Well we allow people to make money off of addicting people, whether it's to games, sugar or social media or suggestive pictures, alcohol, gambling.. there are some base triggers in our biological code that are legal to press.
> A surprisingly large amount of all human economic activity is around exploiting other people's psyche/biology.
There's a book I am reading about evolutionary psychology that posits that a lot of human behavior has unconscious prior motives that serve our biological interests [1]. According to the author, even the high morals of Charles Darwin can be interpreted as "Darwinian" self-interest that served him well in Victorian England. I am not comfortable with his reasoning, the more so given that a lot of it is speculation.
Yeah, probably. The “attention economy” is something that they optimize for. But the focus on “hacking weaknesses” through the decades smells like Christian Sin holdovers. Like there's some concrete buggaboo spot in your brain where the Devil sits. You can see this happening again and again:
- Junk food
- The junk science about the Pleasure Button rat experiment
- Spiritualists obsessing over the dastardly Ego
- People blaming every impulse control problem on Dopamine
Which would be fine if these reactions in fact did anything to solve these problems (or alleged problems). But they don't. Because the answer is always to resist the Devil harder and to trust in your own fortitude.
