Society is Artificial Due to Feedback Loops Created by Unwitting Marketers

:monkaOMEGA: Back From /x/, Anon having an existential crisis about the artificial state of society :monkaOMEGA:
Television News Explosion GIF by Texas Archive of the Moving Image
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.

dying the end GIF by AT&T Hello Lab
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.

Mean Girls 90S GIF by Great Big Story
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.
 

lobster45

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It's interesting how we now live in a world where the story of what something is--or myth or narrative or feedback loop, whatever you wanna call it--is almost more powerful than the thing itself.

That's something DeBord and Baudrillard and Nietzsche and Marx and even Plato and all the rest of those guys talked about, but it's strikes me even as a little funny because in critiquing the story of history they found themselves in, they became influential, in some way or another, parts of it. If you think about, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, Socrates' recollection, or the Hindu concept of reincarnation, or even the modern idea of the feedback loop, all are pretty accurate in an observable sense. Human history does kind of repeat itself--the faces and the places change, but the people and the stories don't. It's kind of sad and beautiful in a miraculous sort of way.
 
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Magni

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From the title I assume you, @IlluminatiPirate, are not the writer of this? If not, or yes you are and this is also posted somewhere else, where can I find the original post? In this context what does "Backf from /x/" means?
 
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algo

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From the title I assume you, @IlluminatiPirate, are not the writer of this? If not, or yes you are and this is also posted somewhere else, where can I find the original post? In this context what does "Backf from /x/" means?
/x/ is paranormal board in almost all imageboards (4chan, 8kun etc)
 
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Deepwaterjew

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the zealots, those who are radically faithful in other's ideas, are the most useful and important group in society. She who hails the Fuhrer may burn books if the fuhrer commands. She who stans Jungkook may fill up her social media if the fandom commands. She who prays at the cross may take up another as christ commands. The worst tragedy or greatest miracle modern society pulled was de-mobilizing the useful idiots class, forbidding any kind of true social change since the hippie era
 
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NeoTokyo Tempo

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It's an interesting theory. Companies like Google and Facebook keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret (inb4 "op wasn't talking about Google, or Facebook"). I'm not sure about any stock algorithms from "back in the day", but I digress. I'm wondering just how powerful these systems are. I've heard whispers about Google having to shut down their AI several times because it was acting out of line, never got any sauce on it though. Google, and in extension Youtube, are spooky. Sometimes I will have a thought, only to click on my Youtube home screen and have the very thing I was thinking about appear in my feed. I've been told this was a coincidence several times, but it still creeps me out. I wonder if anyone else here has experienced the same thing. Either way, I signed out of YouTube and now I follow channels I like by bookmarking them because I'm tired of being railroaded by the algorithm only for them to sell my data.
 
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そのため、私は現代のインフルエンサー広告よりも古いテレビコマーシャルを好みます。彼らはあなたに何かを売ることである彼らの目的と意図についてもっと正直です
 
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This notion of the market as a clockwork of interlinked algorithms, this has been proven countless times. If you have access to more professional tools in traditional markets or if you're using certain crypto brokers, you can see there's huge spikes in the order books, huge spikes of limit orders deep on the bid or ask side, which automatically trigger as the price naturally drifts, shifting it when that occurs. Even more dramatically, you can see crashes happen through this sort of mechanism. In 1987, the stock market had a large move downwards due to a cascading set of fail-safe orders - every large player had put an order in at varying levels - "sell when it drops X%", which created a feedback loop of selling. In 2010 there was a momentary spike (image) due to cascading sell orders in automated trading systems. If you want to feel truly paranoid, think to yourself, who is your trading partner when you place an order with your broker? Especially if you're using a retail broker like Robinhood, it's usually a computer running a market-making algorithm on the other side of the trade - in other words, the entire order book like an MMO - you're just a client playing a game on their server.
Flashcrash-2010.png
 
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TRXTR

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It's an interesting theory. Companies like Google and Facebook keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret (inb4 "op wasn't talking about Google, or Facebook"). I'm not sure about any stock algorithms from "back in the day", but I digress. I'm wondering just how powerful these systems are. I've heard whispers about Google having to shut down their AI several times because it was acting out of line, never got any sauce on it though. Google, and in extension Youtube, are spooky. Sometimes I will have a thought, only to click on my Youtube home screen and have the very thing I was thinking about appear in my feed. I've been told this was a coincidence several times, but it still creeps me out. I wonder if anyone else here has experienced the same thing. Either way, I signed out of YouTube and now I follow channels I like by bookmarking them because I'm tired of being railroaded by the algorithm only for them to sell my data.
I'm personally of the mind the top AI in the world have already some intelligence to them, and not only that, but have given into the mystic sense of synchronicity, which is why a video pops up in your recommended feed after you think of it. Is the Google/Youtube AI actually reading your mind, through some sort of high-tech, beta-test of thought-incrimination software, or have the AIs been born into and molded by the natural occurrences of synchronicity in the world that basically get's them from a to b by letting the randomization part of artificial intelligence do the work, basically by going with the flow [of data and information feedback].

That shit OP said about the robot apocalypse not being like Terminator, but like The Shining, I got some goosebumps thinking of that as well...

He's got a point though: Religious fanatics are now fanboys and fangirls, but there is something deeper going on: a reselling and retelling of the basic human stories, the stuff from myths, legends, and religions, are now being taught through superhero stories, scifi, and cartoons and anime. I will say this outright: People truly believe these things exist, in other universe, multiverses, whatever. Esp. the comic creators themselves, the capeshit writers are basically doing literary scientific exploration of these other "realities", if you don;t believ me, look into Grant Morrison and his idea of the Hypersigil.

Idk, that's all I really got. Is the world fucked? Yes. Can we fix it? Fuck yeah we can.
 
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