Letter to the Editor of Jacobin Magazine
[please forward this to author Ryan Zickgraf]
Dear Editor:
re: “Elon Musk Might Make It Worse, but Twitter Was Already Bad”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-social-media-platforms-private-capitalists
. . . the real problem: algorithmically induced outrage, which transforms our thoughts and attention into a commodity [and] the profit motivation of the privately owned platforms that exist for public discourse.
Don’t be silly. We (activists and others) first started chattering online during the 1980s on non-profit platforms that had no such algorithms.
In the early ’80s people from four San Francisco Bay Area non-profits (ARC Foundation, Center for Innovative Diplomacy, Community Data Processing, and Foundation for the Arts of Peace) came together around a vision of a computer network to support the work of individuals and organizations working to reduce the risks of war and to promote peace. As a result of that collaboration, PeaceNet was launched. Another early online network, EcoNet, joined with PeaceNet and the project became the Institute for Global Communications (IGC). Over the years thousands of people got connected to information and, most importantly to each other, via IGC’s services.
Nice ideas.
People were nasty and disturbed the peace from Day One.
It’s the nature of the technology. Go ahead and bring together thousands (or millions) of semi-anonymous individuals sitting alone at keyboards having thoughts and feelings. If one percent have noxious thoughts and feelings and lack filters the peace will be disturbed.
The technology is incorrigible. It’s the epitome of massification (and, of course, in our society, the epitome of commercialization).
Modern life is characterized by hypertrophy in all aspects of life. The internet is the next “higher stage” of that sorry trajectory.
Reference:
https://medium.com/@stevenwelzer/cyberspace-is-the-new-heaven-ede893d44544
