Introduction: David Bowie's Alien
November 26, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
We're told social networks amplify our voices and connect us more authentically. The mechanics work exactly the opposite. External narratives don't enhance our thinking. They replace it. We absorb stories designed by others and experience them as our own ideas, as if we came up with them all along.
• The transformation social networks enabled is unprecedented in how it works. Writing changed thought. But it still required you to do the thinking. Social networks make other people's abstractions feel like your own consciousness. The difference is between a tool that changes how you think and a system that replaces thinking itself.
• Our brains are evolutionarily wired to internalize external stories. For millennia, we desperately needed cultural narratives and couldn't easily access them. That scarcity created an intense drive to absorb the stories we encountered. Now that drive exists in a world of infinite accessible narratives designed to be internalized.
• What we call democratization of voice is actually the perfection of outsourcing. We're told anyone can broadcast their inner voice now. What's actually happening is the system has become remarkably efficient at disguising external voices as internal ones.
• The loneliness, fragmentation, and conspiracy we see aren't separate problems caused by social networks. They're all expressions of the same mechanism. When your sense of what you think becomes detached from your actual cognition, everything downstream breaks.
• The question isn't whether social networks have changed us. It's whether we can think independently of them anymore, or if that capacity is already gone.
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Comments
An elegant, eloquent, and powerful start! Gonna be a great read.
It makes me consider the overwhelming power of AI taking over social networks.
And binge drinking, which likely hasn’t reached a pinnace yet.
At what point does binge become baseline, and powerful cannabinoids, ketamine, and (perhaps) other soon-to-be-available psychotropics dull the wider population even more than their smartphones already have?
Smartphone sports gambling probably gets there first.
When it goes Orwellian and is referred to as “Victory Bingeing”.
I got a small shudder when your autocorrect killed some humor when you simply copied and replied to part of my comments. That was not expected at all. Did you make a manual change?
“Pinnace” was intentional on my part, being part of the semantic meaning wordplay like Rusty and Shakespeare were having fun with in the article.
Spooky
I did make the change, thoughtlessly assuming that your autocorrect left intact a marine reference. I’m sorry - went right over my head. Hardly spooky, anything that goes on in there.
Rusty, do you think what you’re describing is a new field of study?
I don’t think so. It’s a multidisciplinary application, to be sure, but I think as we progress you’ll see that many of the underlying topics have pretty robust fields of scholarship to call upon.
May it bring scholars from around the world to a major university in Nashvegas.
Jim
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Stepping down from the empyrean heights of the Gospel of John: humans have not done well when new media - new ways to tell the stories - have become widespread. Whether it was the printing press and the subsequent Reformation and Wars of Religion, to the newspaper and the revolutions in America and France, to broadcast media and the rise of both communism and fascism, to apparently social media today, it seems the less savory actors tend to harness the system first, only to unleash havoc that eventually settles into some sort of new, purportedly wiser order. That is, until the next form of media comes along.
Reminded me of this:
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
David Comberg 1.34K subscribers
2,050,888 views | Oct 30, 2010
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’
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