I’m tempted every day to quit once and for all, to leave X and messaging apps like WhatsApp (literally the only “social media” I still use). If you need me, you’d have to call or send an email. But that’s not the main reason. The real reason is that the world is now so manipulated that you no longer have personal authority over what you watch, read, say, or even think. Everything is algorithmically driven. I build algorithms for a living, so I know a bit about this. The crossover of democracy and media makes social reality collapse into pure party narrative, spoiling every kind of interaction, driven by corporate interests aligned with entrenched powers. It’s not fundamentally different from past power dynamics, but back then, my authority over my own thoughts wasn’t on the table. Democracy wasn’t at stake. I could live as I pleased, with only minor intrusions. That’s still technically possible today: you could just dumb down your phone, your internet, your TV, whatever. But none of us actually does it. I’d like to debate why.
The Cathedral (to put this into Yarvin's theme) in the past was just preacher sermons, that was most of the inputs a normal citizen would get from the outer world, all polished through a God-fearing institution, the Church. Imagine now the hell we live in where TikTok or Google are the Church. As we once left mainstream media, newspapers, cable news, radio, it’s now time to consider leaving the mainstream internet. X, TikTok, Google, Instagram: they’re no different from CNN or Fox back then, just faster, stickier, more invasive. The so-called “mainstream” is no longer information, it’s pure curation, designed to keep you locked into someone else’s narrative.
Is not like the past Cathedral, now is going to your inner sovereignty. I can't tell anymore who is trying to get benefits from tech usage and who is honestly into ideas excahnge, seeking of truth. That's why I like some forums like this one, but we should beware.
None of us does it? Speak for yourself. You can just do things (avoid all algorithmically-driven social media content and use the apps etc. exclusively for messaging). The only issue is finding a maximally pristine search engine. (Any suggestions?)
I can't believe that serious people are debating "hmm should we be using TikTok and Twitter feeds to get our news or nah"
>>4379 I do not know any search any that is not affected by the same cancer, the only one that I guess works a little bit better would be YT search and YT algo, since you find relevance and not brain rot, contagion and anger.
Is all about "how" do you spend your time in a service: not the same watching a 20 min physics tutorial or 30 tiktoks on a row of almost nothing. Ads and money will behave in a different way, algo too.
And do not get me wrong, this is not about their business, is about enhancing free will and real connections in life which are not the ones of the internet.
Just to make myself clear: I am pro-tech. I think technology is natural to humankind, but beware.
Said that, there must be a possiblity to developing tech without the current ad-centric schema that bigtechs do enforce. Is just monotonic loop: narrative control, economic growth, ads coming to them, more money, more political enforcement that benefits the schema... is the golden eggs goose.
>>4377 Using an app like X is only really dangerous if you use it passively, taking the algorithmic content stream as a "natural" representation of what is salient on the website as a whole.
If you are *intentional* about how you engage with the app — who you follow, which posts you like, which people you block, etc. — then you can quite easily steer the algorithm to areas of semantic space that you find more compelling. This doesn't make it all that easy to find good content (you still need to work for that), but it does make it easier to avoid the slop and brainrot.
>>4388 After algo, my complain is the *social dynamics* that steers the algorithmic behavior. I tried to point it out in the OP, not quite good, I guess. So this dynamics turn you into a paranaoid conspiranoic if you are surrender by them in a e.g. messaging app group.
The democratisation of online information and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race...
Half joking of course, but in all seriousness this is something that I've been wrestling with since Facebook hit the masses and seeing how our social culture changed how we interact in the physical world in real time. I would argue that the "mainstream" has always been curation in some way shape or form. The big difference now is the acceleration of the "race to the bottom of the brainstem" as Tristan Harris would say.
If I had to answer why the online world is like it is now, I'd point to: - The ongoing consequences from the death of god and lack of meaning - Our values then defaulting to whatever can fill this void: scientism, politics, hedonism, the economic value system itself. - Convenience winning in the modern age. Living and working in the digital age paradoxically burns us out more than ever, leaving little energy for us but to turn our brains off and recover when off work. See how the 996 work culture in China coincides with these workers loving to watch Hollywood sequel slop media after a long work day. - "Getting your bag" is a now the norm for the new generation, not something to look down upon. They wouldn't even know about the concept of selling out. This is downstream from everything I've listed so far. New generations are raised into this culture, for a lot of them, it's all they know. - Meritocracy and democratisation or at least their appearance is antagonistic to a gatekeeping elite who has the ability to act as a guiding compass, curate taste and propose a universal ideal to the masses. There are no longer aristocrats who have a sense of duty to serve either god or the masses. - Death of the monoculture. Our feeds are a reflection of our taste, personalised not universal. - Postmodern subjectivity. All art is subjective. How can something be of quality if beauty is in the eye of the beholder? - Death of curiosity. Curiosity needs boredom. Why try to venture outwards if you're easily fed staying where you are and lack curiosity in itself - Death of the artist (talent) and rise of the entrepreneur. It's not about how good something is, it's about how relevant and popular it is at the time. Quantity > quality. Some entertainers are praised more on their marketing more than their talent - A lot (not all) turbo autists in tech who are behind a lot of this, either can't connect with people in the real world, or don't want to, retreat to the online world. To them, the map is the territory. The subjective does not exist. It's all about what you measure and what you can quantify. Along with some of their finance bros counterparts, they are incentivised to commoditise everything and anything as that's where their value system defaults to. - These same out-of-touch autists believe that a panopticon of surveillance technology is the key to societal problems, using SciFi novels as inspiration. This one is a big head scratcher - One of, if not, the biggest metric these tech companies follows is "time spent on site", they want to optimise this at all cost. If they don't, their competitors will. An addicted customer is the potentially the most profitable customer you can have. Digital heroin is good for growth.
I could go on endlessly. That being said, I've only listed why it's this way and not what the positives are of our contemporary media environment, as there's definitely positives and a path forward to a better future.
I used to build algorithms as well, so I know where you're coming from. I am trying to solve this problem and am building something related to solve a smaller real world problem first. Would love to chat with you sometime outside this forum if you're keen.
>>4388 Spoke too soon on this one, the algo has been unredeemably bad the past few days, to the extent I've noticed it filtering into my subconscious. Taking some time off X to detox.
>>4379 It isn't fully clear to me what "maximally pristine" means in the context of Internet search engines. Unlike social media feeds, where there is an obvious algorithm-free way to serve content--show all posts from people you follow in chronological order--there has to be some algorithm deciding search results. Even the most literal search algorithm, a substring search, would have to decide on some heuristic on how to order the results or it could be trivially abused in the case of reverse chronological order. So there has to be some algorithm. However I fully agree with you that the algorithm behind Google Search is actively malicious. I don't think that the criterion for "good" vs. "bad" search engines is "amount of algorithm used", but what would be better criteria? Other than "I know it when I see it".
Anyway, the reason I started writing this was to recommend Kagi Search. tl;dr it's paid ad-free search with user customization. After using it for a year, I can recommend it both on ideological and practical grounds. You might be interested in its manifesto: https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over. They have a bunch of other writing that I've appreciated across their blog and help docs.
Another post and service probably of interest to this thread are https://blog.kagi.com/small-web and https://kagi.com/smallweb, which is kind like a shuffle button for an RSS reader that indexes every blog written by individuals. I've started reading many blogs I found through the Small Web site that would never have made it through the social media algorithm gauntlet.
yeah, even the idea that it is manipulating you is a manipulation that removes agency from people by making them comfortable with the idea they don't have control and excites the nervous system by triggering {anger} at {enemy} to prime it to seek out more of those experiences. it's literally a casino and people don't care because it's more entertaining than their miserable lives. People don't know what they're missing. Who they'd become if they read the right piece of literature instead of doomscrolling for hours. Who they'd meet and what they'd lear. The internet can evolve so much differently and some evolutionary paths are quite terrifying. Who knows what effect this will have on the younger generation, im hoping the mentats balance out the ipad babies.
“Finally, one learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.” ― Theodore J. Kaczynski
