Back From /x/, Anon having an existential crisis about the artificial state of society
Okay so back in the day, some computer nerds made machines that would take in a bunch of outside data, process it, and try to predict the future. To fund it, they predominantly sold the information to people who wanted to buy and sell stocks. Enough people start doing they started making the machines send out stock reports themselves, which other machines took in as data to further sell, buy, and report on
stock themselves.
This eventually created a massive feedback loop of stock data being managed by autonomic intelligence (not the same as artificial intelligence) that outright blocked out the human element, and right now the open secret is that the market is out of human control. if anyone tried to remove these data loops, even one out of sync chain link could cause the world economy to collapse over night. You following me so far?
So basically, in tandem with this technology, the internet happened and a load of marketers started moving to "content marketing", which is the idea that the product and the marketing are the same thing and that you're selling a lifestyle story, which is why if you pay attention, most companies that used to just sell a product have made massive investments into media space.
This is fine in and of itself, the 80's had a similar version of this. The problem is that the easy proliferation of consumer data reaches these autonomic intelligent egin to report on what kind of narratives sell vs what ones don't. Simple, right? Well, not really. Y'see, we live in a post hypernormalisation world, a soviet term for propaganda that keeps things are something when the reality is different.
When you mix in marketing and propaganda with feedback loops, and add on top of that google's ad program that essentially bubbles people into feedback loops, and only give them what they want to hear so you can sell them something, it basically creates mass psychological dissonance between different groups of people that, consciously or not, have their life's context formed around media narratives. Its one reason why the social justice stuff is hitting so hard now despite the fact that America is an otherwise pretty prosperous country with no major problems causing anyone to starve.
Anyway, the implication is that you basically have cultural narrative context being created by literal abstract machinations who may or may not
be intelligent. That's no good, cause there's no moral parameter to stop the data from trying to get everyone to kill each other. See, people keep
thinking the robot revolution's gonna be terminator, but it's gonna be more like the shining.
So people have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations, which, okay, its pretty bleak but not outright destructive, right? just a bunch of consumers being taken for a ride, right? Well no. Y'see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there's no longer a single common cultural narrative. So you just don't get to see Tim at sunday school, so what?
Well the larger point of contention is that there's always been a considerable percentage of any population that gives way to fanatic behavior, which in antiquity usually meant religious fanaticism. But if the narrative of religion is weakened, and the only other alternatives to narrative are autonomically generated content marketing narratives too shallow to really make a lifestyle out of, you run into a phenomenon where a percentage of the population essentially migrated between brands in a pseudo idolatrous methodology.
When you really come down to it, a fanbase is literally just the same thing as a cult, they both act as a community that bring people together to discuss a specific narrative. Except the religious ones actually at least try to offer the illusion of being beneficial to society at large, while the autonomic models are there purely for profit and offer hedonic sensory overload to compensate for any shallowness. Did you ever stop to think about how we live in a world where a bunch of people do crazy shit over cartoons, harass people, send death threads, sell cars for sauce, etc?
Do you really think that's just normal behavior? No! those sorts of people would've been in a fucking monastery a couple of hundred years ago, they're fanatics, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with being a fanatic if its constructive, but these narratives dont have that interest in mind.
So, to put it bluntly, we quite literally live in a society where abstract mathematical formulas are in charge of a market that pretty much doesn't sell products anymore and is more focused on selling narrative scams based on the perimeters from these algorithms, and a bunch of wackos who in another lifetime would've been witch burners who have nothing too spiritually satisfy their intrinsic obsessive tendencies are replacing a common cultural narrative with many different smaller ones in different tribes, which is how you end up with nazis and commies in a prosperous capitalist country thinking the end of the world is next week, literally creating their own problems.
One could argue that we have too much freedom of choice when it comes to information about narratives, and its actively harming this society. The russians use avant garde techniques in their propaganda to give their population so much bizarre data to sift through they just conform with no real goal in mind, the chinese just censor and have less overall data fed to their population.
But americans simultaneously have too much data, and too little diversity in the data, making it easy for context to corral them into a specific mindset. And all it takes is a pair of eyes to see that the current mindset for american populations is apathetic vs messiah complex murderousness
The silver lining is I think these marketers don't know they're playing with fire. I don't think its entirely out of the question that some day soon a crowd of angry people will actually lynch content creators for not towing their own narrative complex, and very soon they may begin to live in fear. People think this sexual harassment stuff is a big happening, but I think its only going to be a drop in a larger bucket that'll be the 2020s.
If not apocalyptic, they'll be interesting times.
stock themselves.
This eventually created a massive feedback loop of stock data being managed by autonomic intelligence (not the same as artificial intelligence) that outright blocked out the human element, and right now the open secret is that the market is out of human control. if anyone tried to remove these data loops, even one out of sync chain link could cause the world economy to collapse over night. You following me so far?
So basically, in tandem with this technology, the internet happened and a load of marketers started moving to "content marketing", which is the idea that the product and the marketing are the same thing and that you're selling a lifestyle story, which is why if you pay attention, most companies that used to just sell a product have made massive investments into media space.
This is fine in and of itself, the 80's had a similar version of this. The problem is that the easy proliferation of consumer data reaches these autonomic intelligent egin to report on what kind of narratives sell vs what ones don't. Simple, right? Well, not really. Y'see, we live in a post hypernormalisation world, a soviet term for propaganda that keeps things are something when the reality is different.
Anyway, the implication is that you basically have cultural narrative context being created by literal abstract machinations who may or may not
be intelligent. That's no good, cause there's no moral parameter to stop the data from trying to get everyone to kill each other. See, people keep
thinking the robot revolution's gonna be terminator, but it's gonna be more like the shining.
So people have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations, which, okay, its pretty bleak but not outright destructive, right? just a bunch of consumers being taken for a ride, right? Well no. Y'see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there's no longer a single common cultural narrative. So you just don't get to see Tim at sunday school, so what?
Well the larger point of contention is that there's always been a considerable percentage of any population that gives way to fanatic behavior, which in antiquity usually meant religious fanaticism. But if the narrative of religion is weakened, and the only other alternatives to narrative are autonomically generated content marketing narratives too shallow to really make a lifestyle out of, you run into a phenomenon where a percentage of the population essentially migrated between brands in a pseudo idolatrous methodology.
Do you really think that's just normal behavior? No! those sorts of people would've been in a fucking monastery a couple of hundred years ago, they're fanatics, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with being a fanatic if its constructive, but these narratives dont have that interest in mind.
So, to put it bluntly, we quite literally live in a society where abstract mathematical formulas are in charge of a market that pretty much doesn't sell products anymore and is more focused on selling narrative scams based on the perimeters from these algorithms, and a bunch of wackos who in another lifetime would've been witch burners who have nothing too spiritually satisfy their intrinsic obsessive tendencies are replacing a common cultural narrative with many different smaller ones in different tribes, which is how you end up with nazis and commies in a prosperous capitalist country thinking the end of the world is next week, literally creating their own problems.
One could argue that we have too much freedom of choice when it comes to information about narratives, and its actively harming this society. The russians use avant garde techniques in their propaganda to give their population so much bizarre data to sift through they just conform with no real goal in mind, the chinese just censor and have less overall data fed to their population.
But americans simultaneously have too much data, and too little diversity in the data, making it easy for context to corral them into a specific mindset. And all it takes is a pair of eyes to see that the current mindset for american populations is apathetic vs messiah complex murderousness
The silver lining is I think these marketers don't know they're playing with fire. I don't think its entirely out of the question that some day soon a crowd of angry people will actually lynch content creators for not towing their own narrative complex, and very soon they may begin to live in fear. People think this sexual harassment stuff is a big happening, but I think its only going to be a drop in a larger bucket that'll be the 2020s.
If not apocalyptic, they'll be interesting times.