A constant stream of validation.

Millions of echo chambers. An outcome of algorithmic radicalization?

Looking online for validation of your ‘views’? Chances are you will find it, one way or another.

The internet has evolved so rapidly into a giant electromagnetic vibration, throbbing at the center of our society, radiating ever stronger with high-frequency data transfer. Between 4.74 to 5.06 billion people are ‘engaged’ online everyday, and most of us are harnessing a constant stream of information as well as validation: of more and more content which mirrors our thoughts, ideas, desires, cognitive biases, likes, dislikes, conspiracy theories etc. The internet which is visible to us, is one that most often justifies, amplifies and upholds our beliefs. A magic mirror?! Gigantic algorithms vending information already ‘accepted’ by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.

We are navigating a virtual universe which is not only limitless but also indistinguishable for all the information as well as misinformation it contains. Opposition to a given worldview can be quickly dismissed as a cover-up of the truth or of one’s experience. Defined as “algorithmic radicalization” and best encapsulated by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, about the “design features of large social media platforms are exploited to promote extremism.”

We often surf the internet, looking for short simplistic narratives, in order to gain insight or gain some control over a situation or acquire information which fits our pre-existing ideas or wants. The endless circulation of undated, unattributed information on big social media platforms is similar to what mainstream media looked and sounded like 15-20 years ago. To an extent it makes us attention deficient and susceptible in several ways. Like crops can be pollinated across the world, so can our thoughts and ways of thinking. Like ‘consent can be manufactured’ so can bullshit!

Infinite privatized subversive realities can exist. Myriad explanations that our limited cognition can make sense of. Conspiracy theories, attacks on scientists and science, the cancel culture, cyber terrorism, toxic feminism etc often make the headlines. Proliferating within radical groups, targeted at enablers and influencers and eventually upon the rest of the world. Mainstream media in this case is always late, at best playing catch up. It does not shape opinion nor provide objectively useful information anymore. So what shapes the ‘dialect’ of our age? The “lingua franca of the times” equates to hundreds and hundreds of conspiracy theories and millions of deniers of this or that, writes James Bridel in The New Dark Age.

“Conspiracy theories are the extreme resort of the powerless, imagining what it would be to be powerful” (Douglas Hofstader 1996). A conspiracy theory at a base level, feeds into our existential need to feel safe. Or provides hope (false) as a sense of control over what may happens to us. Might point to the reason why millions of people deny climate change or another set of people boldly declare that the queen of England is a lizard in reality! Or still others (numbering millions more) who believe that the elites will vaccinate and control us all.

Be it about global warming, climate change, pandemics, Illuminati, vaccines, immigrants, death of princess Diana, ultra-right, black bloc, Satanists, UFO cults etc etc, the internet helps tremendously in hosting and proliferating the idea of an ‘invisible enemy’. For example, I can place as many links inside a story, pointing to many websites as verified sources backing my argument - call it ‘accessible malice and blame’. I can conjure narratives in which ‘they’ all are sinister! All ubiquitous, powerful, invisible, cruel or even corrupt, luxury-loving, devil worshiping etc etc. You may never know my ulterior motives and never keep pace with my experiences, loyalties and reality. An example.

Men’s rights activists willy nilly graduate towards nationalism as well as misogyny (American, Hungarian, Indian, Israeli, Japanese, British etc). Disaffected Muslim youth transition towards violent self-destructive Jihadism. The loudest names in the LGBTQi community in America thrive inside the echo-chambers of cancel-culture. Climate change deniers, 911 truthers, Crypto-anarchists, Red Pill People, Anti-Vaxxers… the list gets longer and the polarization ever wider, often veering into plain idiotic confederacies or worse dividing people across society, destroying preexisting kinship. And the real life fragmentation also equates to cents and dimes, adding up to millions of dollars as profit. Well known is the fact that on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, it is “substantially cheaper” to run an angry, hateful, divisive advert than it is to run a compassionate, empathetic one. (Francis Haugen 2022)

“This is the magic of big data” (Medium.com 2023). Something that tech-gurus often parrot, about bypassing the need to actually understand anything in detail. Why? Because you can simply place your ‘faith’ in the “truth of digital information” (Wired Magazine). ‘End of Theory’ by Chris Anderson (2008) speculated about a future without the need for “scientific method and dedication”. As erroneous or eerie, the moronic vision points to a constant stream of validation and “post truth”. Earlier we placed our faith in sky gods and now in big data, AI and information technology. To me it seems that big data (as well as it’s fallacy) are a logical outcome of Reductionism. Hedging on the belief that complex systems can be understood (and also mimicked) if we dismantle, study and copy each element in isolation. Agreed that such a practice sounds great, but only if it can keep pace with our experience and reality. But it is proving to be insufficient from the onset.

The circulation of information that we can view (and share) at the press of button is not really enlightening us as planned. Thousands of scientists, researchers and environmental activists are quitting Twitter, disenchanted as explained by Emilia Jarochowska (PHD Earth Sciences) “sea of bad trolls spreading misinformation 24/7…” Like her, many young and old scientists around the world feel threatened and shocked by content of extreme, false and polarizing nature overpowering common people.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, if we searched for information online about vaccines, especially on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, one way or another we would find sources pointing their way to anti-vac opinions, videos and websites. True that the biggest social media platforms under public and state pressure, quickly quelled and censored a lot of the conspiracy theorists and their fans. However the systems completely failed to detect the rise of new players, new bases and voices. “Quickly, these opinions start to feel like the majority: an endless echo chamber of supportive opinion, no matter what the subject matter. “ (The New Dark Age).

Something strange occurs when our desire to know more and more about the world collides with a system that will match its answers to any possible question, however without resolution or fact checking. Twitter and Facebook’s fact checking ability remains “insufficient and piecemeal”. Has censorship also been privatized? Folks like Mark Zuckerberg, Zhang Giming and Elon Musk regardless of their “messianic visions” actually profit from terabytes / zettabytes of ‘hate, spam, deep fakes and misinformation’ flourishing on their platform. Like you and me, many wicked politicians, extremist groups, violent organizations, multinational corporations, the police, powerful data analysis companies etc etc also use the Internet. No one perhaps escapes misinformation to a degree, but cleverly crafted information can also instill faith, fear or what some people call “hopium”. Fulfilled by a chain of elite enablers, who prefer to ask banal questions like “what rights and obligations we should have as digital citizens?”

‘Who owns the truth?’ Ars Electronica 2023. The tagline of Europe’s biggest and oldest event devoted to technology and arts, this year. The curators are inviting artists, scientists, developers, designers and entrepreneurs to consider the above question. The hype is based around truth and ownership, tagged by the experts as “interpretative authority” and “technological sovereignty”. While such a ‘razzle dazzle’ of technology exemplifies a quadrilateral world, devoid of real human emotions, mimicking us in a million different ways, the worship and obedience is tacit. Sadly that is the case with partially gutted institutions like Ars Electronica and many others. Where bogus new euphemisms are invented instead of addressing the actual challenges and threats complicity tied to the Internet, such as radicalization, cyberwarfare, misinformation, terrorism and top-of-the-pyramid global surveillance. Who owns the truth looks and sounds more like ‘what shapes minds’ to fulfill an emerging market? Yes, some “digital citizens” are coming, who have long sublet their reality to a reductionist system (god).

Hosted inside a space called “post-city” which actually happens to be smack in the middle of Linz (Austria), festivals like Ars Electronica keep no record, hence have no mention of how much CO2 they emit during all such ceremonies, of high art and technology worship. Instead the focus is on the supposed “future” fulfilled by the cherry-picked exotic artists from allover the world, pressing together many irrelevant yet dazzling acts, based on some new type of technology. One of the programs features a performance by a contemporary dancer accompanied by robotized factory arm! The entertainment and high art comes at a steep price (200 Euros) but that is part of the norm and was sufficiently clear decades ago. What was not clear, was that all such technology cannot redeem us nor does it place our welfare at it’s center. A vast uncharted horizon full of problems and possibilities, does confuse our neolithic brains a bit too much, unable to make sense of the paradox. Of such info-abundance!

With such abundance of information and misinformation, we find ourselves ‘placed’ inside a vast gray zone. Some folks revel at the limitless possibilities in the age of “post truth”. Sure buddy! and welcome to an over-policed “Electronic Strip Mall” where millions of lookalike soundalike individuals can find themselves living inside a ‘constant stream of validation’. As fragile, huddled, as prone to anxiety and doubt.

For a moment imagine truth to be a ray of white light and the internet as a gigantic prism. Upon hitting the surface of the prism, the light splits up into many constituent colors and directions, depending on the refractive nature of the surface and the wavelength of the light. Hence nothing of the white light remains, nor do we find any black and white duality, as truth (information) and lies (misinformation) is supposed to be. We find ourselves in a multiverse of sorts, wading through extensions of limitless information, a twilight zone of half-truths and half-lies.

In this strange gray zone or a rainbow spectrum if you prefer, like the setting sun, the rays of reason, logic, facts, erstwhile truths and peer reviewed science are all refracting, through an haze of dense and dirty airborne particulates, of the untruths, misinformation, political propaganda, advertising, deep fakes etc. As is the earth is really is out of shape as of now, including our society, rupturing because of too much validation and contradiction at the same time. To end, a recent story speaks of how retarded (excuse me) we might have become as a species: “across Facebook, TikTok and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, commentators shared wild speculations that the fires, which have now taken the lives of more than 1000 people, were the product of arson, a plot to clear the land for billionaires, build nuclear proof bunkers or, most bizarrely, space lasers…”

*Fact - While Spain recorded 66,000 hectares of forest cover loss due to fires in 2023 alone, Canada lost 14 million hectares, an area larger than Greece!