Lesson #4: Connection Between Financial & Emotional Insecurity
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.
"How Algorithms Will Rule the World" by Richard Yao
One. What is the connection between emotional and financial insecurity?
Social media like Google and Facebook are “free” but this is not really a free service. The cost is huge.
Part of the cost is time and attention, as we see here.
We pay by giving up our private data, which Facebook charges for a price, as we see in this Time article.
Fast Growth
Being free meant Facebook and Google exploded. Huge user base and billions of dollars were made quickly.
Just as quickly, over 2 billion people worldwide became “part-time lab rats” in a diabolical mind control experiment.
Advertising grew and grew on these “free” sites to the point that they became part of “mass behavior modification” (97).
Tech entrepreneurs got super rich and the giant customer base became miserable addicts beholden to the social media “drugs.”
Two. Why would paying for services be better than “free” BUMMER?
For one, the pay distribution would be bigger: More people would make money.
Should you pay Sam Harris directly for his podcast or let him get paid through royalties via some kind of AdSense venue? He probably gets paid 20 times more by direct payment rather than ad royalties.
For two, paying a vendor directly improves content. For example, we pay for HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and their content is excellent. Compare their content to a YouTuber who makes Adsense revenue.
For three, BUMMER is an unhealthy barter system. Lanier writes: “Let us spy on you and in return you’ll get free services.”
Three. How is BUMMER a disease on Martin Luther King’s dream of the moral arc of justice?
Martin Luther King posited that over time, life’s moral arc tended toward justice. This is described in Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom as the politics of inevitability. It is inevitable that over time the human race gets better: more just, more smart, more moral, more decent.
But there is another vision of the world. We might call it the Pendulum View. The pendulum swings back and forth between justice and evil; kindness and cruelty; love and hate.
Lanier argues that BUMMER destroys the moral arc narrative and makes us tribalistic assholes unable to sustain the kind of democracy that would lift humanity toward the kind of justice Martin Luther King describes (107).
BUMMER weaponizes misinformation to spread racist totalitarianism throughout the world (109).
Themes from World Without End by Franklin Foer
Mold You Into Their Image Is Not Free
We read that social media tech entrepreneurs are attention merchants who make money from stealing your life. This is why social media is not free.
“More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies desire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.”
Tech companies don’t make money by helping you preserve your free will. They make money by automating everything you do. You are a lab in a behavioral modification experiment. Your social media is not “free.”
GAFA stays dominant by enslaving you to their product. What is GAFA, as the Europeans call it? GAFA is the following: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
Social Media Is Taking Us to Point of No Return
Foer writes: “Once we cross certain thresholds--once we transform the values of institutions, once we abandon privacy--there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.”
GAFA controls our diet of information resulting in them controlling our behavior. No one anticipated that a few institutions could control billions of people. This is a dream come true for tech giants.
This is a nightmare for individualism and freedom.
This concentration of power from the monopolies results in the “homogenization” of behavior. This spells death.
Facebook Steals Free Will:
“While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them. It’s a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.”
Algorithms Replace Free Will
Foer writes: “Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction.”
You are a transparent lab rat:
Foer writes: Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status, and drug use on the the basis of their ‘likes’ alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analyzed to uncover the mother of all revelations, ‘a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.’”
Amazon’s Growing Monopoly
Amazon’s monopoly control is explained by Hasan Minhaj in his Netflix show The Patriot Act.
“I Quit Social Media” in a 4-minute video.
“Why I Quit Social Media” in an 8-minute video.
“How to Break Your Social Media Addiction” in a 10-minute video.
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