#technologycorporations

[hannahmatthewswestminster]

the social dilemma, netflix

a deeply disturbing documentary that explores the catastrophic impacts of social media on us as a specie, culture and society. our lack of trustful information, enabling us to live in a disinformation society, taring apart the very roots of how society works and is formed. it showcases a family and represents the impacts it has within family constructs; younger children and teenagers who can’t seem to get themselves away from their devices. it visually showcases how detrimental these devices and platforms are to mental health, with the rise of suicide & mental health directly coinciding with the rise and popularity of social media. no average person truly understands how these platforms work and how they enable you to stay online, addicted and focused for so long, on things that seemingly won’t help us develop in our lives and within ourselves, its as though these devices have put a pause on evolution. of course, they have enabled instant access to pretty much any kind of research, information and knowledge, however how much of this information is true and what is not. many had a lot of admiration for google on these terms, whilst they built a parallel money machine, away for the majority of the publics understanding, tailoring information to the individual and not the truth

it’s sad how infected we have become by these platforms, and very intentionally. the corporations make more money, the more time you spend using them. ‘if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product’ we are being sold. but really i feel it delves deeper than that. the algorithms deeply understand you more than your family, more than you even do, they predict the future in terms of your behaviour, your interests, how long you spend on specific things, learning what to send you next to keep you attached for longer. you are against a powerful and highly intelligent algorithm that is changing the way you behave and is wasting your life to using these platforms. these platforms are competing for your attention. their business model is to keep you engaged on the screen, and figure out how much of your life they can get you to give to them, how they can keep your attention. our attention is the product being sold to these corporations, changes in our behaviour is the product, changing what we do and how we think. who we are. a very gradual change, very gradual. its scary and the world is being infected by this technology. they are earning enormous amounts of money from our innate human capability of attention. surveillance capitalism enables this to happen, by gaining vast and huge amounts of data, data has now surpassed the price of oil. this marketplace trades in human futures, changing the future as we know it. these markets have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity

everything you do online is being watched, being tracked, every single action you take, how long you look at an image for; they know when you are lonely and when you are depressed, whether you are an introvert or extrovert, they know what your personality type is. they have more knowledge about us that has ever been known in the history of humanity. there is no supervision and they are just continually making better and better predictions about us. they build models that predict our actions, they build a whole online digital version of us, like an avatar voodoo doll. everything we’ve ever done, all gets brought back into building an accurate model about us, predicting what we will do next. what video will keep us watching, what images we want to see, how to keep us engaged. they are able to control your behaviour to an extensive length, that you can’t consciously grasp and that pretty much everyone other than these technology companies is unaware of

the very meaning of culture has become manipulation, deceit and mistrust has become the centre of everything we do. these companies know so much about the psychology of what persuades people, and then use that within technology. they learn how to make technology persuasive, it is designed intentionally to modify people’s behaviour. ‘positive intermittent reinforcement’ - it operates like the gambling shot machines. you are being programmed at a deeper level, you don’t even realise it and this is all within the design technique. these aren’t things you can necessarily decide to ignore, even in terms of tagging a photo... they don’t show you the photo they just show you you’ve been tagged which logs you on, facebook have used this to its maximum capacity, which gets people tagging left right and centre

its mass scale manipulation

50 white middle-aged guys make the decisions that have impacts on 2 billion people, causing them to have thoughts that they didn't intend to have, due to notifications and things appearing on the screens

we have evolved to care about whether people in our tribe think well of us or not, but we are not evolved to be aware of what 10,000 people think of us, we were not evolved to have social approval dosed at us every 5 minutes. we conflate hearts, likes and thumbs up with truth and value, for short hits of dopamine

if something is a tool it is genuinely sitting there waiting patiently, if something isn't then it is there grabbing your attention, taking your time away from you, it has its own goals and own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you. this is overpowering human nature. we have less and less control over who we are and what we believe. we don’t trust anything anymore as we don’t know what to believe. they’re dragging people into this matrix and harvesting them to gain insane amounts of money

technology is an indirect existential threat, its the technologies ability to bring out the worst in society, which is the direct existential threat

a lot of people fear AI yet AI already runs today’s world, right now. “there is only a handful of people at these companies who understand how the systems work, and even they don’t necessarily fully understand whats going to happen with that particular piece of content so as humans we’ve pretty much lost control over these systems, because they’re controlling the information we see. they’re controlling us more than we’re controlling them” - you build the machine and then the machine builds itself. the technologists are framing this as a problem that they are able to solve. in terms of misinformation, AI cannot even solve the problem of fake news, google can’t either but most importantly they don’t know what truth is. we can’t agree what is true which means we can’t navigate out of any of our problems. and worst of all, AI is just going to continuously get better at predicting what is on the screen, not worse

you see different results depending on where you live, depending on your interests. they tailor your information to what you are interested in, the computers calculate what is perfect for you, so they create your world. everyone’s reality online is different, which has a catastrophic effect in realtime

how do you wake up from the matrix if you don’t know you’re in the matrix

“if we go down the current status quo, for say like another 20 years, we’d probably destroy our civilisation through wilful ignorance, we’d probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change, we’d probably degrade the world’s democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction, we’d probably ruin the global economy, er... we probably don’t survive. you know, i really do view it as existential”

“whether it is to be utopia or oblivion, will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment...” - buckminster fuller

its simultaneous utopia and dystopia

“we live in a world where a tree is worth more financially dead, than alive. a whale is worth more dead than alive, as long as the economy works in this way, and the companies go unregulated they’re going to continue to destroy trees and kill wales, to mine the earth and pull oil out of the ground even though we know that it is destroying the planet. they know that it is going to leave a worse world for future generations. this is short term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. as if somehow magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interests is going to produce the same result, this has been effecting the environment for a long time. what’s frightening and what is hopefully the last straw, what will make us wake up as a civilisation to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we’re the tree and we’re the whale, our attention can be mined. we are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an add, than if we’re spending our time living in a rich way and so we’re seeing the results of that. we’re seeing the results of corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention towards things they want to look at, rather than things that are most consistent to our goals and our values and our lives”

the attention extraction model is not how we want to treat human beings. we can demand to not be treated as an extractable resource

an interesting concept to explore within my project, looking at the 3 men controlling your notifications (behind the devices) who are experts in how to grab your personal attention; experts on you, they understand you more than you understand yourself. knowing your routine and how to catch you at specific times of the day, what will get your attention and what wont. they build up a digital persona of you, an ‘avatar voodoo doll’. how people have become digital counterfeits of themselves, how our data is collected, what it visually collects about us. facial recognition; face id to unlock iphone. exploring the structure of the face turning our body into a digital organism that can control the digital world... looking at fingerprints, other ways to identify yourself that is gradually being integrated within technology, which highlights how these systems have physical data on us, not just online interactions and locations