Lesson 2: Wolf Pack Aggression, Fakery & Meaninglessness
Essay Assignment
In a 1,200-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that compares the dehumanization in Andrew Sullivan's essay "I Used to be a Human Being" to the dehumanization articulated in Jason Lanier's notion of BUMMER, which is explored in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Be sure to have 3 sources for your Works Cited. One of the sources will be Lanier's book.
One. How does Lanier compare the Asshole Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates Assholes
Simple syllogism: Assholes get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates assholes.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important that any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period of time close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood. Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Exit BUMMERland.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
BUMMER amplifies everything that is fake because in part fake gets attention; real does not.
How Lies Beat the Truth
Armies of fake people gather to “steal the oxygen in the room” so that real voices can’t be heard (55).
If swarms of trolls repeat lies over and over, how do truth-tellers spend time on real news when they have to waste their time refuting lies, which becomes an exercise in futility.
When trolls accused President Obama of being a Muslim terrorist who didn’t have a birth certificate to prove that he was born in America, the media wasted a lot of time rebuking a lie that was so preposterous that it should not have been even addressed, but because of huge movement propagated this lie, the lie could not be ignored. The lie “stole the oxygen in the room,” so to speak.
Holocaust Deniers on Facebook
Zuckerberg allows Holocaust deniers to have a voice on Facebook as we read in this Guardian article.
Fake News Makes Money for Social Media Sites
Fake accounts spreading sensational fake news get a lot of hits and traffic for Facebook and YouTube, so these platforms profit from lies.
Fake news makes lots of money and is hard to detect, as we see in this Washington Post article.
Writing fake news can make individuals more than $10,000 a month on AdSense according to this Washington Post article.
Social Media Profits from Tribalistic Partisan Hatred of The Other
Fair-minded news is too boring for social media platforms, which appeal to our lowest reptilian self, so social media news by its very nature is tribalistic, partisan, hateful, and reptilian. As a result, America has never been so divided (57).
Fake News Is Dangerous
The mass lie that vaccination shots are dangerous and the cause of autism gains steam on social media platforms so that parents deny their children proper vaccinations. This can result in epidemics of measles and other life-threatening diseases.
People who immerse themselves in BUMMER cannot think critically. They are loyal to their tribe but disconnected from reality.
Four. How does social media remove context?
Social media replaces any context you give to your content with its own context, based on algorithms. “You are no longer a name but a number” (65). He continues: “A number is public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.” In other words, living in social media’s algorithm-based context is a prison.
Five. How is social media destroying empathy and human connection?
Two ways: tribalism by isolating us in our own filter bubbles and the loss of public space to inward smartphone absorption.
Filter bubbles alters our reality and cuts us off the reality of others, as explained in this Ted Talk video of 9 minutes.
Consider we live in our own filter bubbles.
Consider we are cut off from our sense of physical space as we get and more and more plugged in to our smartphones.
Consider we become loyal to our tribe by expressing rage against our foes on the Social Outrage Machine of social media.
Consider all of the above, and you’ll see we’re becoming a people cut off from one other. This should concern us for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is violence.
Six. How does social media strip us of our capacity for happiness?
Social media makes its profits by winning our attention, so much so that these “attention merchants” are motivated to turn us into addicts. Addiction spells the end of happiness. As Jaron Lanier writes: “It will dole out sparse charms in between the doldrums as well, since the autopilot that tugs at your emotions will discover that the contrast between treats and punishment is more effective than either treats or punishment alone. Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia” (82).
Anhedonia is the self-imposed prison of isolation and futile pleasure from a life that is beholden to addiction.
Fakery on the Internet
"How Much of the Internet Is Fake?" by Max Read
Material from Adam Alter's Irresistible
One. What determines successful elimination of an addiction?
We read that 95% of heroin addicts have relapses even after going through an excruciating detox.
But Vietnam vets had 95% successful addiction cessation after they returned to America because they had removed the thing that matters most:
Environment
Try all you want to stop an addiction, but once you immerse yourself in the people and places of that addiction with all the requisite triggers and you’re hooked again.
Alter points to a dramatic case study of a brilliant student Isaac who goes on a 5-week binge and ignored hundreds of phone calls before he answers his mother’s and undergoes an intervention.
He leaves his “Addict Environment,” Washington, DC, and returns to Seattle for reStart intervention. He had greasy hair, he had gained 60 pounds, he looked like a monster.
The lesson is that smart, good people, not “addictive personalities,” can become addicts if in the right environment and circumstances.
Drugs used to be the addictive substance that snared us.
But in the digital age addictive behaviors are the new danger, and addictive behaviors, generated from the internet, are everywhere, even our pocket.
Two. Why are internet-driven behavioral addictions so dangerous?
For one, the internet is everywhere. How do you avoid it?
For two, many internet behaviors result in fast feedback. Fast feedback stimulates dopamine in the brain’s pleasure center.
Remember, learn to stimulate the brain and you can take anyone and make them into an addict.
A stimulated brain produces dopamine, but then the brain quickly shuts down the dopamine to “dam the flood of euphoria.”
In the absence of euphoria, the brain becomes uneasy, restless, uncomfortable and the person is compelled to get another dopamine fix.
Repeatedly returning to the Internet for emotional, stress, and dopamine-depletion relief results in severe addiction.
Three. What malady is rising in adults?
Sleep deprivation afflicts two thirds of adults and is growing thanks to email, smartphones, and other gadgets.
Sleep deprivation is an addict’s partner, the result of “over-engagement” with a behavior or substance.
60% of adults keep their phones close when they sleep.
Screen light kills melatonin, the hormone that helps us sleep.
Four. How is addiction a form of misguided love?
We are hardwired to love. Learning to love is a survival mechanism. We find unity, connection, and loyalty through the art of loving.
We want to love. We want to experience the full immersion of losing ourselves entirely into this force greater than ourselves we call love.
When we surrender to this greater force, we experience wonderful brain sensations, including dopamine.
Addictive behavior seeks to have the same brain stimulation as someone who is deeply engaged in this power we call love.
In the absence of real love, we seek substitutes: We seek Facebook friends, Instagram followers, and we have an insatiable appetite for likes and comments. We became addicted to this social media matrix, but we do not find love.
We find anxiety and depression, and of course, we find ourselves addicted.
Five. Why was Stanton Peele marginalized for so many decades by the scientific community?
Contrary to Alcoholics Anonymous and other organizations, Peele didn’t believe addiction was a disease, an orthodox belief of many treatment programs.
Nor did he believe addiction required complete abstinence.
Instead, Peele believed addiction is the association between an unfulfilled psychological need and a set of actions that assuage or cure that need in the short-term but that have destructive long-term consequences.
After four decades, Peele’s addiction model has slowly gained credibility in the mainstream.
Six. How does an addict suffer from a divided soul?
An addict can hate his addiction intellectually because he can understand how the addiction is destroying him. He can hate his dependence on constantly going one Facebook, for example. But here’s the split: His brain still craves Facebook. Social media sites are feeding his brain something his brain craves. And yet he knows social media is his devil, if you will, his source of self-destruction. He’s divided.
My brain knows that chocolate cake, the huge slices I crave, are bad for my weight control, but my brain craves the dopamine explosion provided by chocolate cake.
Seven. Why does goal-setting in the social media age lead to emptiness and despair?
We are never good enough. We can never project the “hologram of the superpowered self” (to take language from Kristen Dombek in her essay “Emptiness”) to our ideal of perfection.
We are encouraged to partake in a sort of megalomaniacal narcissism, which leaves us emptier and emptier even as our avatar self wallows in an attention bath of thousands of likes and followers.
In the past, having goals was about survival.
But now goal-setting is an artificially-created ego device.
The goal of reaching 5,000 followers is more important than reaching 5,000 followers because in world of social media addiction we have to stay distracted and always be pushing ourselves.
“Wearable tech” has exacerbated our obsession with goals. We must reach 10,000 steps a day; we must have at least 10,000 “engagements” on Twitter and at least 10,000 followers.
After a Facebook post, we need at least 100 likes within an hour or else our self-worth will not have been validated sufficiently and we will send the rest of the day sullen and pouting.
We must chronicle our “journey” from having a “fatty belly” to having a “six pack” with video posts on Facebook or YouTube and gain thousands of followers in the process.
We must unbox yet another piece of gaudy jewelry or some newfangled tech device so that our subscribers can drool and burst in violent paroxysms resulting in yet thousands of more likes and comments so we can wallow in our sense of relevance and validation.
We have smartphone apps that can count calories when we photograph our meals and then these calorie counts can be posted on dozens of social media sites so we can be lavished with praise for our outstanding dietary discipline and fortitude, which will result in more likes and followers.
This self-obsession contributes to narcissism, which results in disconnection from one another.
Study Questions
One. How long would you stay on Facebook or any other social media site if your posts were ignored?
These social media sites would die except that they give feedback. For example, one of the most popular sites, Reddit, uses up and down arrows to show approval or condemnation of posts.
Feedback is a reward system that stimulates the brain.
Social media works in part because of what we might call the Mutual Sycophant Club: I scratch your back and you scratch my back. We like each other’s posts, no matter how insipid, unremarkable, and mediocre, in order to fuel the feedback loop.
Getting caught up in this loop is a huge time suck, a huge distraction, a huge waste, and a huge diversion from meaningful pursuits. But its draw is peer pressure and the tyranny of Technology: Don’t live in the common currency of technology and be irrelevant, invisible, and essentially dead.
It takes a lot of courage to live off the grid.
Many people cannot do it. They are so dependent on the sense of community, however fake, that they derive from their social media accounts. To delete their accounts would result in a feeling of terrifying, primal aloneness, for which there is no word in English. We have to look to German:
Mutterseelinallein: complete abandonment, the sense that your mother's soul has left you.
People with tattered, undeveloped, needy selves will be too scared to go off the grid because they will become possessed by the terror of mutterseelinallein.
Feedback Loop Can Be Explained by Pigeon Experiments
In 1971, researcher Michael Zeiler did pigeon experiments in which he found they pecked more ravenously when their pellet rewards were inconsistently given because the inconsistency was analogous to gambling’s dopamine effects.
Decades later, Facebook did an experiment with a “like” button, the first of its kind on the Internet, and the “like” button had the effect of crack cocaine. It was a game-changer. Suddenly Facebook grew exponentially, not just in users, but in the amount of time users spent on Facebook.
Getting “likes” was like gambling. Your uploaded photo might win a lucky strike or it might be a dud, but when you got a “full house,” as it were, you received a huge dopamine hit.
Facebook users got addicted. They experienced euphoria when they enjoyed a hailstorm of “likes”; they experienced shame and anguish when their posts were ignored or not liked.
Think about it: Adults with higher degrees of education, with high-ranking jobs, with family responsibilities were sitting at their computers in their robes drinking their green Matcha tea or eating their Hot Pockets while obsessing over their Facebook ranking. They had been reduced to experimental pigeons. They had become needy and pathetic.
But here’s the thing: Users were on Facebook LONGER than before. And that’s the point. Website creators want you on their site, the longer the better. They need to find ways to get you hooked. They don’t like you. They don’t respect you. They look at you as a potential addict, and they’re the pusher.
They actually look at you as a dumb rat or a dumb pigeon. They are rich, and they are laughing at us.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is on record for having said that “trusting Facebook users are dumb *****.”
Two. What is the Human Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle?
Studies show that humans can’t sit still. They can’t be alone with their thoughts. They settle into a life of easy because, ironically, settling into the good life, a life full of comfort and non-conflict, drives people crazy.
People will induce their own problems out of nothing, they will create new challenges, they will sink into a hole, just so they can create a solution to a problem that never had to exist in the first place.
Rich movie stars do nose dives into self-destruction, we are told, because the thrill of success can’t be enjoyed unless interrupted by challenge.
In other words, we’re incurably stupid.
We operate on the Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle.
The drug pushers of the Internet know this all too well.
The makers of games know this all too well.
Tetris and World of Warcraft are built for people who need constant challenge and distraction.
People are addicted to setting never-ending goals to avoid being still.
Karoshi
They play games, try to improve their social media status, wear fitness watches, take their work home on laptops to “get ahead of the curve,” and the final summation of this never-ending treadmill is the Japanese term karoshi—“death from overworking.”
Getting on the Internet treadmill becomes a neurosis and a disease. People lose their essential self, and they don’t know it because it feels normal.
Three. What is the Zeigarnik Effect?
Incomplete experiences occupy our minds and stay in our memories more than completed ones.
This is analogous to a cliff hanger for a TV show. If it ends on a cliff hanger, we are more likely to become obsessed and watch subsequent shows.
Cliff hangers can create compulsive binge-watching.
“Post-play” maximizes the cliff hanger principle. Breaking Bad from Netflix becomes a 13-hour nonstop movie punctuated with cliff hangers.
The Assist
The Netflix binge became a phenomenon, and the binge works because in addition to cliff hangers, Netflix has your programming defaulted so that if you do nothing but just sit in front of the screen the next episode will begin automatically. This is called an “assist” in the industry.
Four. What is the “bad is stronger than good” principle?
No matter how good the reviews on Yelp, Amazon, and Rate My Professor, it’s the bad reviews that stick out and have the biggest influence on people.
This principle applies to social media. You may get lots of good feedback on your channel, but it’s the mean ones that punch you in the gut and make you forget the positive feedback.
Always wanting to overcome negative feedback with greater and greater positive feedback feeds social media addiction.
Five. Why are children more vulnerable to Internet addiction than adults?
Children don’t have the natural boundaries that mature people have.
And just as dangerous, if we let children do easy things like using the Internet at the expense of more difficult albeit rewarding things like reading books, we deprive children of an important principle: Hardship inoculation.
The younger we experience tough tasks and learn how to overcome their difficulty the more we will embrace meaningful, challenging tasks later in life. For example, we may be tragically raising a generation of non-book readers.
Six. What is gamification?
Gamification is taking a non-game experience like fitness, nutrition, or social media abstinence, and turning it into a game with points and opportunities to beat personal records and so on.
Alter writes: “Gamification is a powerful business tool and if harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. “
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