Another thing which I observe is that [device-driven] psychology hasn't made us happy, but psychology has found ways to break us down; break us down in terms of analytically, but also break us down psychically, like actually make us feel worse. Those are unfortunately the things that are easiest to deploy. It's much easier on the Internet to make someone stupider and less happy than it is to make them wiser. The internet has good purposes if people use it very wisely, but in terms of what's simplest, it's much easier to break somebody down than it is to build them up. That's a major thing.
Then in terms of the machine learning, as seen by what's on Twitter [faked profiles, robot driven shares] I think that more and more the internet is a realm where humans are in the minority and they're getting overwhelmed. There was this old idea in science fiction about ... not just in science fiction, the Turing Test in computer science. When are computers going to actually be artificially intelligent? The test was, "will they be able to persuade us that they're human?" What's actually happened is it's not that the computers are competing with us to be more human, it's that the computers are making us less human. That's how they're winning. They're breaking us down into little pieces so that we're less human and more tribal, and more angry and more emotional. That's the way this competition is actually shaking down.
There's simple things to do like just spend less time on the internet and more time in the real world. There are things we can do as individuals to shake free of that. But yeah, basically it allows nasty forms of politics, which people did not anticipate. And to just deny or spin your wheels as Facebook has spent the last couple of years doing, and others the last couple of years doing, is really, really harmful. One has to think expansively and creatively about the negative possibilities and see what's happened, what has really happened. What happened is that Donald Trump is the payload of a Russian, and not only a Russian, but mainly a Russian cyber weapon [propaganda strategy]. That's what happened. One has to see that as part of a larger palette of possibilities of things that can happen and think seriously about it.
SR: Do you see any evidence that people are thinking seriously about it, or are they just trying to copy Trump digital director Brad Parscale because he figured out how to use Facebook's advertising platform on a scale that others hadn't gotten to first?
TS: There are certainly people who are thinking seriously about it. There are people who are running media literacy projects. There are people like Tristan Harris who are trying to be cyber ethicists. There are people like Peter Pomerantsev who are trying to explain how this works in Russia, and therefore what the signs are that you need to look out for. That's a minority. There aren't that many people, but yeah there are people who are thinking seriously about it. What one has to worry about is the possibility that we all just get in the same game and we'll all think, "Okay well, life is just a matter of fooling the other person better." If they use cyber weapons on us, we use cyber weapons on them. We'll all just make each other stupid in the methods that we prefer.
We're never going to have a democracy that way. We're never going to have the rule of law that way. We're not going to have happy populations that way. When people end up voting because they're motivated by messages that are false, that means that they're basically unhappy because A) their vote cannot lead to a productive result because they're voting in unreality; and B) they then have to come up with human reasons to explain why they did this thing, even if the reason why they did it, the cause wasn't human. Then they use their human intelligence to rationalize what they did before. That also makes them unhappy, and it makes other people unhappy as well.
This weird uncanny feeling that one has in America now is partly the effect of a lot of humans using their human intelligence to try to rationalize things that they got manipulated into doing. It's an unhealthy emotional smell almost in the atmosphere, which is the result of all this.
SR: Do you see this changing, or do you just see small pockets of resistance by a minority of people who, like 20 years ago, would say, "I'll turn off my television." I see so many ways the role of being a citizen is shrinking. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Cyber tools of negative campaigning. It just goes on and on.
TS: I'm glad to talk to somebody who sounds more negative than me because I don't usually get to be in that position. Look, the three-dimensional world is still out there. As you know very well, you can still have campaigns in the three-dimensional world that make a difference. Precisely because the internet, in many ways, is dark, that means that doing little things like marching make us feel better than they would have otherwise. It is possible to run campaigns with humans. Especially when I talk to young people, one of the things that I feel like we have to work through is the hesitation that we have with talking to or engaging other individual human beings in the real world. That's become a kind of political problem. We think everything has to start with cyber. But not everything has to start with cyber. Things can start in the real world as well.
There are plenty of examples of that. I don't think it's irreversible. I think the cyber thing has to be conceptualized and it has to be contained. But then in addition to that, there has to be activity out in the three-dimensional world, out in the real world where human beings are talking to other human beings. I agree with you, we can't have citizenship without that. That's one of the things that the Greeks had right. They thought that democracy was public. Democracy is public. If we all end up sitting in our basements liking and unliking [things online], we're definitely not going to have democracy.
SR: I'm not trying to be unduly negative for its own sake. I'm trying to push back a little bit because you can actually talk about this with a level of clarity that I appreciate.
TS: There's one more thing that I'm hopeful about, too -- if I can just?
SR: Sure.
TS: That is people who are young are internet literate. We may be at the cusp of a generational change where there are people who take all these wonders for granted and they're no longer quite so stunned by them, or drawn in by them, and are maybe looking for something fresh. What I'm hoping for, and in a way counting on from the generation to come, is the ennobling of activity in the real world, and making facts sexy, making the real world be the attractive countercultural thing that people find interesting again, making knowing things cool. I think there are some stirrings, not just here, but also a little bit in Russia that this is going on. That's another reason I have to be a little bit hopeful.
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