Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• The allure of glitchy feedback is probably what draws a lot of people into crummy “codependent” relationships in which they aren’t treated well. (Location 180)
• Whether or not positive feedback might in theory be more effective in certain cases, negative feedback turns out to be the bargain feedback, the best choice for business, so it appears more often in social media. (Location 245)
• Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax. (Location 246)
• If you want to motivate high value and creative outcomes, as opposed to undertaking rote training, then reward and punishment aren’t the right tools at all. There’s a long line of researchers studying this topic, starting with Abraham Maslow in the 1950s and continuing with many others, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (joined by writers like Daniel Pink). Instead of applying the simple mechanisms of behaviorism, we need to think about people in more creative ways, if we expect them to be creative. We need to foster joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity, and other qualities that don’t fit into a tidy chart. (Location 257)
• Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. (Location 278)
• You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote. (Location 442)
• Prohibitions are engines of corruption that split societies into official and criminal sectors. Laws work best when they are reasonably aligned with incentives. (Location 488)
• Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people. (Location 507)
• BUMMER isn’t great as a long-term business strategy. (Location 514)
• Similarly, a BUMMER addict eventually becomes preternaturally quick to take offense, as if hoping to get into a spat. (Location 552)
• But I’ve observed that since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world. (Location 600)
• It’s not helpful to think of the world as being divided into assholes and non-assholes, or if you prefer, trolls and victims. (Location 609)
• Each of us has an inner troll. (Location 610)
• I don’t know how far that goes with wolves, but it’s dramatic in people. When people are locked in a competitive, hierarchical power structure, as in a corporation, they can lose sight of the reality of what they’re doing because the immediate power struggle looms larger than reality itself. (Location 622)
• In the scientific community and among virtually all nations in the world, there’s a consensus that we must confront it, and yet a small but powerful group of businesspeople and politicians don’t buy it. They perceive the science of climate change as a plot to attack their wealth and power. That’s an absurd notion, an absurdity that’s only possible when you’re locked into understanding the world solely in terms of human power struggles, to the exclusion of the larger reality. (Location 625)
• When the Solitary/Pack switch is set to Pack, we become obsessed with and controlled by a pecking order. We pounce on those below us, lest we be demoted, and we do our best to flatter and snipe at those above us at the same time. (Location 635)
• The only constant basis of friendship is shared antagonism toward other packs. (Location 638)
• There would no longer be a way to guess the number of beans because the power of diversity will have been compromised. When that happens, markets can no longer offer utility to the world. (Location 654)
• Solitary. Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting. (Location 668)
• It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals. (Location 670)
• In BUMMERland, it seems as if every little comment either turns into a contest for total personal invalidation and destruction, or else everyone has to get all nicey-nicey and fake. (Location 701)
• On BUMMER you have to fight gravity just to be decent. (Location 706)
• What we need is anything that’s real beyond social pretensions that people can focus on instead of becoming assholes. (Location 709)
• Look into yourself. Seriously, are you being as kind as you want to be? (Location 719)
• Our peer groups influence us profoundly when we’re young, but that remains true throughout life. If your extended peer group contains a lot of fake people, calculated to manipulate you, you are likely to be influenced without even realizing it. This is a difficult truth to accept, but because of the importance of social perception, it is true to at least a small degree that you have been living a fake life yourself. BUMMER is making you partially fake. (Location 756)
• Fake people are a cultural denial-of-service attack. (Location 760)
• the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers. (Location 767)
• Media forms that promote truth are essential for survival, but the dominant media of our age do no such thing. (Location 839)
• The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore. (Location 993)
• when everyone is on their phone, you have less of a feeling for what’s going on with them. Their experiences are curated by faraway algorithms. You and they can’t build unmolested commonality unless the phones are put away. (Location 1003)
• Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left. (Location 1011)
• I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened. (Location 1076)
• (Be aware that when you do that, it might have an impact on your feeds; you might be tagged—not necessarily explicitly, but implicitly, by association—as a potentially depressible person. Online manipulators might use algorithms that automatically try to take advantage of that, and it might make you depressed.) (Location 1105)
• BUMMER places me in a subordinate position. It’s structurally humiliating. (Location 1134)
• How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine? (Location 1185)
• Being free is what propelled these services to become so big so fast. It is also the foundation of the BUMMER business plan that has been so destructive, that has turned most of the human race into part-time lab rats. (Location 1257)
• The movement to make software free was founded on an honest mistake. It became dogma that if software wasn’t free, then it couldn’t be open, meaning no one but the owner would see the source code, so no one would understand what the software really did. (Location 1266)
• Ultimately, only one method of reconciliation was identified: the advertising business model. Advertising would allow search to be free, music to be free, and news to be free. (That didn’t mean that musicians or reporters got a piece of the pie, for the techies considered them replaceable.) (Location 1297)
  • Note: Musicians and movies are especially replaceable because the content distributors can largely determine which content will be popular.
• We’re talking about an industry that supports some of the richest companies the world has ever known, and it’s all driven by data that comes from people who are often being told that they’re about to be obsolete, that they’ll need to go on the public dole with a basic income system. It just isn’t right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people. (Location 1327)
• We’re pretending that the people who know how to translate are obsolete, when in truth they’re still needed. Isn’t it some kind of sin to tell someone that they’re obsolete when it isn’t true? (Location 1341)
• BUMMER ultimately fuels loudmouthed assholes and con artists more than it does the initial groups of hip, young, educated idealists, because in the longer term BUMMER is more suited to sneaky, malevolent manipulation than to any other purpose. (Location 1459)
• BUMMER studies early idealists and catalogs their quirks by its very nature, without an evil plan. The results have the unintended effect of lining idealists up so that they can be targeted with shitposts that statistically make them just a little more irritable, a little less able to communicate with dissimilar people, so a little more isolated, and after all that, a little less able to tolerate moderate or pragmatic politics. (Location 1461)
• BUMMER undermines the political process and hurts millions of people, but so many of those very same people are so addicted that all they can do is praise BUMMER because they can use it to complain about the catastrophes it just brought about. (Location 1464)
• BUMMER is neither liberal nor conservative; it is just pro-paranoia, pro-irritability, and pro–general assholeness. (Location 1534)
• A year after the election, the truth started to trickle out. It turns out that some prominent “black” activist accounts were actually fake fronts for Russian information warfare. Component F. The Russian purpose was apparently to irritate black activists enough to lower enthusiasm for voting for Hillary. To suppress the vote, statistically. (Location 1604)
• BUMMER makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry—and that suited Russian interests perfectly. BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game. (Location 1627)
• what they’ve experienced in their feeds, while the reverse is also true; the empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can’t know the context in which you’ll be understood. You’re probably becoming more of an asshole, but you’re also probably sadder; another pair of BUMMER disruptions that are mirror images. Your ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted. Politics has become unreal and terrifying, while economics has become unreal and unsustainable: two sides of the same coin. (Location 1663)
• So BUMMER intrinsically enacts a structural, rather than an ontological, change in the nature of free will. (Location 1696)