Why the Past 10 Years of American #Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the #ArabSpring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when #Google #Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of #Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by #language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what #humanity could do.
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This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched #Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
#society #internet #network #social #fail #problem #economy #hate #mobbing #shitstorm #news
