Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine
October 15, 2023 at 1:36 am | Posted in capitalism, dangers of social media, digital technology, Inequality, mental illness, miscarriage of justice, politics, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: Facebook, Jordan Peterson, Max Fisher, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Susan Johnson's Aphrodite’s Breath, The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world, You Tube
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.
Continue Reading Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine…
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
February 23, 2020 at 4:04 pm | Posted in mental illness, miscarriage of justice, optimism, Simplifying, wild camping | 2 CommentsTags: Charlie Byrnes Bookshop Galway, cortcobasal degerneration, Rayor Winn, Shankill Castle, South West Coast Path, The Salt Path, www.shankillcastle.com
I’m travelling through Ireland, en route to a writing residency in County Kerry and the bookshops here are brilliant. A favourite one is Charlie Byrnes Bookshop in Galway. My favourite book from there is The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (Penguin, 2018).
Sitting before roaring log fires in Shankill Castle’s drawing room (my landlord Geoffrey calls it the withdrawing room), I couldn’t put this book down. But I didn’t want it to end.
The Salt Path was a Sunday Times Bestseller and it’s easy to see why. The author and her husband, called Moth, decide to walk from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall, a distance of 630 miles. They carry rucksacks and a small, lightweight tent, with no money to back them up except a minimal weekly pension and even that uncertain and diminishing for no reason they can fathom or do anything about.
It was an impulsive decision, made when the bailiffs were literally banging on the windows of their farmhouse. They’d lost their home of twenty years, their livelihood from it, and their animals. After three years of endless battle with the courts (using up all their savings), a clear miscarriage of justice had landed them in this position.
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