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Yesterday I was listening to the interview Joe Rogan did in his show with Tristan Harris, from the Centre for humane Technology (creator of the "Social Dilemma" documentary). I thought it was an incredibly powerful episode, I encourage everyone to go and watch it. While it was happening I started taking notes, they were giving a ton of really useful information regarding the state of the world with big social media platforms, and their inherit danger towards democracies.

I think is crucial for all of us to comprehend where we stand, to know more deeply which forces are being deployed against us in this unnatural warfare of our attention. That is why I'll attempt to summarize the 3hs plus conversation (that you should still go and listen to) and touch on their key points.

First, Tristan makes at the beginning of the episode a great statement of the actual problem we are facing, he explains it like this:

We have paleolithic emotions and brains that are easily hackable.
Medieval institutions that fundamentally are unable to adapt or foresee new technologies.
With Godlike powers through technology.

so how can wield the power of gods? without the love, prudence and wisdom of a god?

I thought it was beautifully put, while also being extremely accurate. The rate of technological evolution is faster than ever. The rate of this evolution is also speeding up, creating an exponential growth. At the same time our institutions are slow and highly bureaucratic, filled with people that don't understand all this innovation happening around them. It certainly seems like a recipe for disaster.

Social media seems to be, at this stage a huge pain for society. It is dividing us more than ever, and taking every stand on every issue to their extreme. Making unity almost impossible. The rate of disinformation is such that we struggle to even agree upon the same set of facts.

Tristan gave some numbers when it comes to this that I think it is very important for us to be aware of:

-19 of the top 20 Christian groups in Facebook were run by troll farms (imagine a warehouse full of people who's full time job is to create false memes attempting to bring chaos in other people's life).
-2/3 of the top 15 groups for African Americans were run by troll farms.
-1/3 of the top 15 groups for native Americans were as well.
-85% of the people reached by these groups were NOT following them.
-In October a study showed that 140 million Americans per month were reached by troll farms.

We are all being affected by it, we are not living in an objective reality anymore. It is getting harder and harder to discern what is really a fact and what it isn't. The development of other technologies like "Deep Fakes" will only make this problem worsen.

I think it is safe to say that we are in an information war. Imagine the troll farms as the airplanes in world war II dropping bombs over the innocent civilians, while Facebook and the other social medias are gleefully charging them for the right of doing so, while granting them hyper accurate targeting capabilities. Maybe them we can begin to understand the underlying issue.

For now the problem is only of curating. The AI and algorithms are choosing which posts get promoted, and mostly just seek to optimize for user engagement. This makes the most extreme posts and ideas flood to the top. The problem will double in the next few years once their will be in charge of not only selecting the content, but also producing it. We are getting to the point where it will be impossible to discern whether a post is made by a human or a machine.

There are many more things to point out from the interview which I'll do in the next article (part 2).

For this point alone I think is crucial for us to understand what is happening. So that we can avoid becoming mindless victims of this.
We need to do the hard work of getting to know the people we trust for information. We can't accept anything we read at face value anymore.

I think this is yet another example of how people who are not paying attention to what is happening will do poorly in the next coming years. Most likely it will further widen the divide, as people won't be able to make the right decisions if the information they act on is not accurate.

I think at some stage we we will need to make each article published as an NFT. The Blockchain offers the only verifiable way of knowing without a shadow of a doubt that the article in question was created by the author and was not tampered with. The AI might be able too imitate the author's style to a perfection, but they cannot copy the Blockchain's digital timestamp signature.

Which means, once again, that those who understand and start adapting to this new technologies will do much better in the future. At the same time we need to stop supporting those who profit from our division, the companies, those who produce and promote divisive content and the politicians. If we can get to stage where we are ok with someone else disagreeing with us, if we can be polite and seek to understand where they come from and what they can teach us. Maybe we can start to find a way through this. I'm afraid many won't be able to do this, which might end in some sort of separation.

We are definitely in uncharted waters, and the road might get a bit trickier from here on forwards. So stay alert, and hope we can make it through.

I hope this helps, have a great day!

PS: I welcome people who think differently to post their opinions in the comment section (I encourage it!), but please, keep it civil and don't personally attack the others. We can all learn from each other if we treat everyone as we like to be treated :)