Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy. You may also consult Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone,” and Tristan Harris’ Ted Talk video “How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Everyday.” Also consult these works from Tristan Harris: “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” and “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. You can also use Andrew Sullivan’s and “I Used to be a Human Being” and any other credible source.
March 9 Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
Writing Strategy:
Introduction Paragraph 1:
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Writing Strategy:
Introduction Paragraph 1:
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Argue that Jaron Lanier has made a persuasive case that the existence of "BUMMER" in social media compels us to at the very least delete our social media use by 90% or outright eliminate it.
Paragraph 3:
Paragraph 3 based on your first Lanier homework assignment: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
Paragraph 4:
Paragraph 4 based on your second homework assignment: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves. Lanier is referring to the "A Factor."
Paragraph 5: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 6: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
BUMMER is reviewed in The Guardian. Excerpt:
A is for Attention acquisition
People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.
With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives
Everyone has been placed under a level of surveillance straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel.
Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices – especially, for now, smartphones – that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.
Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.
C is for Cramming content down your throat
Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.
Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn’t Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.
If someone isn’t paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.
F is for Fake mobs and faker society
This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn’t part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.
Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.
It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.
Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.
The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.
If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
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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