Pen Hanley's Blog

Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine

The manipulation of neural pathways

The weekly radio co-hosting preparation was swallowing too much time and compelling me to spend most of it on current affairs. I’m doing it only once a month now. Without the radio over-commitment, I limit current affairs consumption to basic knowledge of what’s going on. What’s going on is always depressing. And there’s nothing ordinary people can do about the corruption and ignorance level to which this country has sunk.

According to Max Fisher we can thank social media for this. Fisher has outlined how this happened in his The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world (Quercus, 2023).

Neuroscientist Polly Crocket discovered that social media activates a powerful set of neural pathways and that online norms of ever escalating outrage and conflict ‘transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self destruction.’ Fisher explains that this technology, ‘by training us to be more hostile, more tribal, and more prone to seeing out-group members as less than fully human, might be doing the same to society and politics as a whole.’ (p. 46)

Online platforms like Facebook mean that ‘billions of people’s moral compasses are potentially tilted toward tribalism and distrust. Whole societies are nudged toward conflict, polarization, and unreality – toward something like Trumpism.’ (ibid)

Tearing society’s fabric apart

The Facebook founder is making too much money from the feedback loops manipulating preferences towards extremes to pay more than lip service when governments try to make him rein in its algorithmic preferences. The head of the UN Fact Finding mission found that social media, especially Facebook, played a ‘determining role’ in the genocide in Myanmar and then Sri Lanka. The misinformation and lies spread by Facebook tore the fabric of those societies apart, just as we see it doing the same to other countries. In Sri Lanka when the government blocked Facebook the violence stopped.

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