I don't care much for what I've read from Jia Tolentino and I can't stand Chris Hayes. They always struck me as the epitome that middlebrow, bourgeoise, expensive coffee-shop patronizing, trendy bakery frequenting, conversation-about-a-conversation having, shamelessly gentrifying, flagrantly privileged, desperate to cover themselves in the veneer of cultured intellectualism without actually putting in any of the work crowd that I absolutely despise. And even I was having trouble getting on board with some of the vitriol you were hurling their way, but you got me there by the end.
"Finally, we are at the rub. Because all of these people who are complaining about how reality is broken are, in fact, making plenty of money and chatting away on podcasts and raising kids and doing all the rest of it, and one of the main things they are complaining about is that they feel like they're under assault from other people's suffering."
This is when you won me over. These are people who incentivized and actively profited from what they are decrying, and even their complaints are almost entirely self-serving. What's the difference between some MAGAT who says that things were so much better in the 50's, 60's, 90's or whenever, when there was no such thing as racism or police brutality or discrimination of any kind, because they weren't hearing about it in their all-white, internet-less communities, and someone who complains that social media is breaking their brain because it gives voice to people who are actively suffering from injustice? It's the same egocentric worldview in which the value of a thing is determined solely by how much comfort it provides to the privileged. Hayes is almost entirely indefensible and Tolentino, from what I've read (and it isn't all that much) may as well be the poster-child for NPR. No sympathy indeed.
"1. People's phones have convinced them that they are functionally omnipotent beings who can know and opine about everything of importance in the world because every important thing in the world is there in their social media feeds."
I may not agree entirely with 2-5, but this is an objective fucking fact. I think there is a whole element of the role of the corporatization of media and its effect on the medium itself (with the corporatization of media comes the need for advertisers, with the needs for advertisers comes the need to allow space for ads, with the need to allow spaces for ads comes the need for concision in exchanges, with the need for concision in exchanges comes the need to only ever host people who present opinions that reinforce the status-quo or appeal to 'common sense' as opposed to people who challenge the status quo, as they would need space to explain why and provide evidence) that one could get into, with social media being a kind of refinement, but it ultimately doesn't matter. This is where we are.
And it's only going to get worse with the advent of AI. People legitimately cite ChatGPT and Grok as sources in official fucking documents. They rely on them to summarize books, studies and documents that they can then pretend to have actually read and understood. I've been in the same room as people who use them to fact-check, and to come up with rebuttals, which should be terrifying enough to anyone who knows how AI works, but particularly terrifying to someone with in-depth knowledge about any subject who has dealt with AI in any way, shape or form and experienced firsthand the countless factual errors it provides as so-called information and the way its prompt-based responses essentially make it into a gigantic confirmation bias machine.
Marshall McLuhan would be having a field day in 2025.
Agree 100% with all of this. Especially like your notion that:
"with the corporatization of media comes the need for advertisers, with the needs for advertisers comes the need to allow space for ads, with the need to allow spaces for ads comes the need for concision in exchanges, with the need for concision in exchanges comes the need to only ever host people who present opinions that reinforce the status-quo or appeal to 'common sense' as opposed to people who challenge the status quo, as they would need space to explain why and provide evidence"
This is something that has been on my mind for a while now and you've really helped me articulate it in my head. It's not just our phones but the whole media ecosystem that is narrowing our knowledge base. And I think that the basic structure of the LLM AI stuff will only accelerate this. As they scrape the internet to construct their "knowledge," they will naturally give more weight to things/ideas/phrases that are more commonly stated. That "knowledge" will be turned into "answers" - the kind of stuff you note in the last paragraph above - which will then in turn be scraped by the AI. Anything at the margins - which by definition includes anything by outsiders, by anyone outside the "norm," and especially anything challenging - will slowly be eliminated, just by statistical lack of repetition, from the knowledge base of the actual people who rely on these things.
As I've thought about this today, I've realized that one of the reasons I find this terrifying is that it amplifies what I'm starting to think is perhaps the main problem behind so much of what's happening: people are being taught to be, or made to be, anti-educated. I just saw a Gallup poll about immigration saying that now a huge swath of people think it is beneficial. This doesn't seem to me to say anything interesting about people's opinion, but instead about how uneducated and reactive they are. Four months ago they thought immigration was the most terrible thing in the world, and then the ICE insanity happened, and now they have a different opinion. I suppose there is a real-world benefit to this, if it slows down the Nazi-ification, but in the main I don't think you can run a democracy in which people aren't educated enough to have an informed opinion on a basic civic issue until shit hits their social media feeds.
I don't know, man. I'm finding this to be a legitimate test of things I've thought I had a handle on - compassion, my understanding of human nature, my faith in humanity, my belief about the real possibility of the world entering a legit post-apocalyptic nightmare, etc. There's a part of me that's actually fascinated by my response: it's a bit like sitting in a philosophy class and talking about how you can actually know that there's not a pink elephant in the room with you, and then you look up and there's an actual goddamn pink elephant in the room that wasn't there before, and you think, "Whoa, maybe I should be re-evaluating my priors" (as the assholes on the internet say)...
And then I click over to the NY Times and find this at the goddamn top of the page:
"In the last few weeks, Rayyan Arkan Dikha, an 11-year-old boy who lives in Indonesia and, according to his local government, goes by Dika, has been hard to miss on social media, even if you’ve never heard his name. A video of him dancing on the front of a boat has become an internet sensation and is the reason “aura farming” has become a popular phrase."
I could go on for hours about AI, a subject near and dear to my heart, but suffice to say that relying on large-scale aggregation that leans heavily into confirmation bias as a foundational tool for education, something that is already happening at all levels, is fucking suicide. By its very nature, AI is de-incentivizes breakthroughs snd radical realignments in favor of preserving he status quo. Dependence on AI will lead to stagnation in science and education. And my fesr is that world will be perpetually stuck in the 2020s (and that's one of the more optimistic scenarios). And that's without even getting into generative/iterative "creative" AI...
Anti-intellectualism has always been a huge threat to social progress, and AI is its best friend.
And yeah, the NYT is a lost cause. There are still some good reporters there, but the editorial staff is absolute garbage and has been for a while, certainly from way before they vocally capitulated to Trump 2.0.
I don't know what the future of media is, but I sure as hell hope it isn't Tik-Tok or the like because then we will be truly fucked. Talk about concision...
I don't care much for what I've read from Jia Tolentino and I can't stand Chris Hayes. They always struck me as the epitome that middlebrow, bourgeoise, expensive coffee-shop patronizing, trendy bakery frequenting, conversation-about-a-conversation having, shamelessly gentrifying, flagrantly privileged, desperate to cover themselves in the veneer of cultured intellectualism without actually putting in any of the work crowd that I absolutely despise. And even I was having trouble getting on board with some of the vitriol you were hurling their way, but you got me there by the end.
"Finally, we are at the rub. Because all of these people who are complaining about how reality is broken are, in fact, making plenty of money and chatting away on podcasts and raising kids and doing all the rest of it, and one of the main things they are complaining about is that they feel like they're under assault from other people's suffering."
This is when you won me over. These are people who incentivized and actively profited from what they are decrying, and even their complaints are almost entirely self-serving. What's the difference between some MAGAT who says that things were so much better in the 50's, 60's, 90's or whenever, when there was no such thing as racism or police brutality or discrimination of any kind, because they weren't hearing about it in their all-white, internet-less communities, and someone who complains that social media is breaking their brain because it gives voice to people who are actively suffering from injustice? It's the same egocentric worldview in which the value of a thing is determined solely by how much comfort it provides to the privileged. Hayes is almost entirely indefensible and Tolentino, from what I've read (and it isn't all that much) may as well be the poster-child for NPR. No sympathy indeed.
"1. People's phones have convinced them that they are functionally omnipotent beings who can know and opine about everything of importance in the world because every important thing in the world is there in their social media feeds."
I may not agree entirely with 2-5, but this is an objective fucking fact. I think there is a whole element of the role of the corporatization of media and its effect on the medium itself (with the corporatization of media comes the need for advertisers, with the needs for advertisers comes the need to allow space for ads, with the need to allow spaces for ads comes the need for concision in exchanges, with the need for concision in exchanges comes the need to only ever host people who present opinions that reinforce the status-quo or appeal to 'common sense' as opposed to people who challenge the status quo, as they would need space to explain why and provide evidence) that one could get into, with social media being a kind of refinement, but it ultimately doesn't matter. This is where we are.
And it's only going to get worse with the advent of AI. People legitimately cite ChatGPT and Grok as sources in official fucking documents. They rely on them to summarize books, studies and documents that they can then pretend to have actually read and understood. I've been in the same room as people who use them to fact-check, and to come up with rebuttals, which should be terrifying enough to anyone who knows how AI works, but particularly terrifying to someone with in-depth knowledge about any subject who has dealt with AI in any way, shape or form and experienced firsthand the countless factual errors it provides as so-called information and the way its prompt-based responses essentially make it into a gigantic confirmation bias machine.
Marshall McLuhan would be having a field day in 2025.
Agree 100% with all of this. Especially like your notion that:
"with the corporatization of media comes the need for advertisers, with the needs for advertisers comes the need to allow space for ads, with the need to allow spaces for ads comes the need for concision in exchanges, with the need for concision in exchanges comes the need to only ever host people who present opinions that reinforce the status-quo or appeal to 'common sense' as opposed to people who challenge the status quo, as they would need space to explain why and provide evidence"
This is something that has been on my mind for a while now and you've really helped me articulate it in my head. It's not just our phones but the whole media ecosystem that is narrowing our knowledge base. And I think that the basic structure of the LLM AI stuff will only accelerate this. As they scrape the internet to construct their "knowledge," they will naturally give more weight to things/ideas/phrases that are more commonly stated. That "knowledge" will be turned into "answers" - the kind of stuff you note in the last paragraph above - which will then in turn be scraped by the AI. Anything at the margins - which by definition includes anything by outsiders, by anyone outside the "norm," and especially anything challenging - will slowly be eliminated, just by statistical lack of repetition, from the knowledge base of the actual people who rely on these things.
As I've thought about this today, I've realized that one of the reasons I find this terrifying is that it amplifies what I'm starting to think is perhaps the main problem behind so much of what's happening: people are being taught to be, or made to be, anti-educated. I just saw a Gallup poll about immigration saying that now a huge swath of people think it is beneficial. This doesn't seem to me to say anything interesting about people's opinion, but instead about how uneducated and reactive they are. Four months ago they thought immigration was the most terrible thing in the world, and then the ICE insanity happened, and now they have a different opinion. I suppose there is a real-world benefit to this, if it slows down the Nazi-ification, but in the main I don't think you can run a democracy in which people aren't educated enough to have an informed opinion on a basic civic issue until shit hits their social media feeds.
I don't know, man. I'm finding this to be a legitimate test of things I've thought I had a handle on - compassion, my understanding of human nature, my faith in humanity, my belief about the real possibility of the world entering a legit post-apocalyptic nightmare, etc. There's a part of me that's actually fascinated by my response: it's a bit like sitting in a philosophy class and talking about how you can actually know that there's not a pink elephant in the room with you, and then you look up and there's an actual goddamn pink elephant in the room that wasn't there before, and you think, "Whoa, maybe I should be re-evaluating my priors" (as the assholes on the internet say)...
And then I click over to the NY Times and find this at the goddamn top of the page:
"In the last few weeks, Rayyan Arkan Dikha, an 11-year-old boy who lives in Indonesia and, according to his local government, goes by Dika, has been hard to miss on social media, even if you’ve never heard his name. A video of him dancing on the front of a boat has become an internet sensation and is the reason “aura farming” has become a popular phrase."
I'm losing it...
I could go on for hours about AI, a subject near and dear to my heart, but suffice to say that relying on large-scale aggregation that leans heavily into confirmation bias as a foundational tool for education, something that is already happening at all levels, is fucking suicide. By its very nature, AI is de-incentivizes breakthroughs snd radical realignments in favor of preserving he status quo. Dependence on AI will lead to stagnation in science and education. And my fesr is that world will be perpetually stuck in the 2020s (and that's one of the more optimistic scenarios). And that's without even getting into generative/iterative "creative" AI...
Anti-intellectualism has always been a huge threat to social progress, and AI is its best friend.
And yeah, the NYT is a lost cause. There are still some good reporters there, but the editorial staff is absolute garbage and has been for a while, certainly from way before they vocally capitulated to Trump 2.0.
I don't know what the future of media is, but I sure as hell hope it isn't Tik-Tok or the like because then we will be truly fucked. Talk about concision...