Beta male in an Alpha world @docbailey42 - Twitter Profile

So something social media did, maybe especially Facebook, is flatten out the extremely complicated landscape of human relationships into "friends" or not. Basically anyone you ever met, including matriarchs and patriarchs of families, parents, etc., plus people you barely know or might work with or just met a couple times or had similar politics or random hobbies as all got dumped into "people I know," and the results were social bedlam. We don't interact in real life like everyone we know has the same social standing or would even be allowed to see how we act with other people in different social relationships. You wouldn't act in front of a respected grandmother the way you cut up with your boys or even work or political stuff. The inherent respect is bulldozed by the medium. The algorithms (and the AI driving them) are doing this kind of flattening out of a complicated and subtle landscape again. The results are already bad and will likely be bedlam. The thing doesn't know if you engaged or even just hesitated over, or shared, content because you liked it, hated it, were outraged by it, thought it was amusing but unimportant, had to sneeze, got talked to by a real person and paused your scroll, were confused by the content, etc., and then it just feeds you more of it like you liked it and want it shoveled into your brain. This isn't good. The same is true not just of content, though, but also of its producers. It's another weird kind of flattening and mixing of a complex social reality, now mixed with a lot of unreality too, and it's simply not good. It isn't just that it's unsatisfying or annoying, though. It's that it can radicalize, frustrate, demoralize, and primrose-path people into bad places psychologically very easily. I don't know what we should do with these technologies, but I don't find it surprising that we have such enormous apparent rises in social, spiritual, emotional, and psychological sicknesses since they've been introduced and become such an integral part of everyday life, and that's without the distraction, addiction, and inherently quasi-antisocial nature of the whole activity.

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