The Facebook Papers / Propagandamaschine Social Media / Entertainment-Value of Conspiracies
The Politics of Nostalgia is a beast.
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The Facebook Papers
The Facebook Papers continues the publication of leaks by Frances Haugen in a dozen or so news outlets from Bloomberg to the Washington Post, the linked Politico piece has links to all the articles in all publications.
Haugen also speaks to british politicians today and her media campaign is (party) financed by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire who founded Ebay and financed The Intercept. Politico has a piece on this and Glenn Greenwald goes in depth on his Substack (as you can imagine, he is not very fond of his former colleagues). Here’s The Verges 8 Things we learned from The Facebook Papers.
I’m not very interested in any of this business-money-power-complex, as the psychological mechanisms exposed by Haugens leaks are nothing new and her material is not very relevant to those mechanisms in a sense that it “merely” exposes more of the same from a company that obviously has no idea what to do in the face of those mechanisms. In other words: Psychological and societal effects from things like Social pressure from comparing yourself to your peers on [platform] or reality distortions from tribalistic feed curation or the gamified attention economy with highly manipulatable content assets really doesn’t give a shit about business and politics.
This story for me is much more about power shifts through democratization of publishing tools as described by Martin Gurris Revolt Of The Public than prevailing power relations. However, these are interesting background stories on a subject that is larger than business or money and there are more in the pipeline, it seems:
Good Times, Facebook!
And speaking of Pierre Omidyar, here’s The Intersection, an interesting shortfilm at the intersection of societal upheavals from climate change and social media. It reminds me of Keiichi Matsudas wellknown shortfilm Hyper-Reality, but with a much broader scope than just advertising. The Intersection was filmed by Superflux and commissioned by the Omidyar Network.
Links
Speaking of Martin Gurris Revolt Of The Public, Scott Alexander has a new review of the book and does not recommend it, because today, it’s “pointless” and “stating the obvious”. (Which, for a prophetic book like this, might be a good thing.)
Twitters own research found, that algorithms prefer and thus amplify rightwing outrage, which is kinda duh I guess? Piece on protocol.com about the study.
About the entertainment value of conspiracy theories: "Participants clearly tended to rate the blog post supporting the conspiracy theory as the more entertaining one." Yes, because they are a form of modern storytelling and they spread memetically along emotional axis on arousal-scales and engagement-lines. Conspiracies are fairy tales, or to quote the best comedian, George Carlin: “It’s fucking entertainment. That’s what it is.”
The Jacobin discusses Grafton Tanners Book The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia. As expected, they mostly tell the story of modern day nostalgic mania in a capitalist framework, which totally makes sense, but lacks the internet as a factor.
I always wondered, if it’s just happenstance that the advent of the “eternal 80s”, a retro trend that started 20 years ago and never really went away, came along in timing with the internet and social media. I do think that the atemporal qualities of digital media environment and this influence of our perspective on the world plays a large role in this. On the internet, there is no time in a sense that there is every time at once. There is the allmighty contemporary with its news/hype cycles and every other history fades in and out of it. Internet means the absence of narrative time in a sense that there is not narrative arc, no development, it’s just everything at once in tiny bits and fragments of information. It’s a baroque mashup of all the styles from all eras through history, from the stone age until now, with all Steamdieselsolarpunks and retroactive fads you can imagine. I think this is a not too small chunk of the nostalgia story that goes missing, when you tell it only in critical stories about capitalism and power structures. Good piece from The Jacobin nevertheless.
Nicolas Carr, one of the first Digital Pessismists and author of Mind, Memory and Media in the Age of Instant Information, has a new, long piece in The New Atlantis about How To Fix Social Media.
John McWhorter at the International Literaturefestival Berlin about Cancel Culture and Wokeness. Interesting throughout.
Bari Weiss says No to the Woke Revolution. Good for her.
Fix Facebook by making it more like Google+. The Dunbar number and platform-design.
The Technopolar Moment - How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order. It seems there is a crystalizing consensus forming on the global power of platforms and their nation-like status, which, given that platforms provide a space for living makes kinda sense, but I haven’t given much thought about this, yet. (I mean, I am extremely confident that digitization and the web will lead to a global world in the long run, remind you that climate change is a global unifying factor too, and this is one obvious step in that direction. But I didn’t think about any specifics yet.)
Arte Dokumentation: Die Ingenieure des Chaos - Propagandamaschine Social Media
Der investigative Dokumentarfilm blickt hinter die Kulissen der globalen populistischen Bewegungen, analysiert ihre Online-Strategien und spürt die "Ingenieure des Chaos" auf: Informatiker, Meinungsforscher und Big-Data-Experten, die im Verborgenen Schlachtpläne für Politiker erstellen. Sie kennen keine Skrupel, wenn es darum geht, ihren Kandidaten zum Sieg zu verhelfen ...
Vor 15 Jahren lobten demokratisch gewählte Politiker aller Länder begeistert die sozialen Medien – für ihre Rolle bei Revolutionen und Befreiungsbewegungen rund um die Welt. 2011 folgte dann der Arabische Frühling. Eine neue Überzeugung brach sich Bahn: Je mehr Information frei zugänglich sei, desto bewusster könnten sich Bürger entscheiden und Völker ihre Ketten sprengen. Doch die Geschichte nahm einen anderen Lauf. In den USA, in Indien, Brasilien und Italien – allesamt große Demokratien – schafften es dank der neuen Informationstechnologien Populisten an die Macht. In vielen weiteren Ländern stehen sie kurz davor. Extremisten haben Hochkonjunktur, Gesellschaften polarisieren sich, Wahrheit wird relativ. Und überall, wo die Wahrheit als Nebensache gilt, ist die Demokratie in Gefahr.
„Propagandamaschine Social Media“ blickt hinter die Kulissen der globalen Populismus-Bewegung, analysiert ihre Online-Strategien und spürt die „Ingenieure des Chaos“ auf: Informatiker, Meinungsforscher und Big-Data-Experten, die im Verborgenen, am Computerbildschirm und mit Hilfe riesiger Datenbanken Schlachtpläne für Politiker erstellen. Um ihren Kandidaten zum Sieg zu verhelfen, schüren sie durch Mikro-Targeting und Online-Manipulation den Hass im Netz und heizen die Stimmung immer weiter auf. Sie nehmen dabei in Kauf, dass die Gesellschaft gespalten und der demokratische Diskurs untergraben wird.
Der Dokumentarfilm verfolgt auf mehreren Kontinenten den grenzenlosen Informationsfluss. Von Washington bis Brasilia, von Rom bis Neu-Delhi: Überall auf der Welt wird das Verhalten der Menschen beeinflusst und verändert. Die Methoden und die dazugehörigen Technologien gleichen sich.Die Informationsschwemme und die immer durchlässigeren Grenzen zwischen Wahrheit und Lüge haben die Paradigmen der Politik weltweit verändert. Doch es gibt auch Widerstand gegen diese Entwicklung: Couragiert kämpfen Faktenchecker, Aktivisten und Politiker gegen die Desinformation im Netz an.
Dokumentarfilm von Alexandra Jousset und Philippe Lagnier (F 2020, 95 Min)
