The first President of Facebook, and Napster cofounder Sean Parker, had harsh words for the company whose meteoric rise was aided by his own efforts:
"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'"
"And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."
Parker explained exactly what this circle, this snake swallowing its own tail, really means: "It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."
"The inventors, creators — it's me, it's
, it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously."
Upon its creation, the internet was new, fertile, a primordial ooze for the bubbling up of genuine novelty and greatness. And yet, once the internet was commercialized, it became just one more limb of the depersonalization and corporate control being leveraged over human individuality, swallowing us all into a hellscape where 70% of all online traffic is related to Google or Facebook.
What was originally intended to be free, horizontal and open has now become closed, commercialized and centralized. This problem is at the core of our modern world, and the intersection of technology and capital that will come to create functioning AI. The facts are clear: the world is becoming less and less personalized and individual by the day, and we are all caught in its enclosing net, the birth of vast hive minds that thrive on likes, comments and clicks. It's not a viable mode for humankind to advance whatsoever. Instead, it's a profit model. And it only benefits a few select organizations - Google, Facebook, Instagram, and their ilk.
We're all trapped in this cycle. I write to you now, from this cycle. We've built an addiction-catharsis feedback loop to sell ads, and now the businesses of the future are all onboard. The alternative is to not make money.
Roger McNamee, a major investor in Facebook and Google, said to The Guardian:
"The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences ... The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models."
The model, the system, the algorithm is the problem. It does not matter how nice Mark Zuckerberg may be, just as it does not matter how nice the CEO of a major bank may be. The system is what achieves actions and results, not the individuals. And the system is a runaway train on a dark and stormy night.
