Language developed very slow, ugh, ah, and is accelerating faster and faster. Hm, everything seems to do this nowadays. Take all those funny ancient, Language developed very slow, ugh, ah, and is accelerating faster and faster. Hm, everything seems to do this nowadays. Take all those funny ancient, medieval, renaissance texts and how entertainingly cute they wrote, talked, and grammared, isn´t it lovely. For a very long time the control over punctuation, grammar, spelling, was in the hand of the few ever so smart intellectuals that decided what was right and wrong, what a correct standard is and what an evil, wrong, stinking, different approach.
This lead to bizarre overcomplications, reforms that got reformed and so many unnecessary overachiever brain wars that wanted one right language and not an intelligent compromise like, let´s say, for instance, different alternatives to write something as long as the logic and intelligibility don´t suffer. But then the specialist would have had no jobs anymore, so the senseless learning for millions of kids continued.
And then, bang, internet. Not that the poor young ones didn´t have to learn stupid, illogical rules anymore ( I mean, what do they believe language is, math, physics or something?), but now language could start evolving quicker, freer, and more manifold than ever before, with each subgroup, culture, special interest, and it keeps accelerating, bazinga.
This fascinating concept, how language is changing and will develop in the future thanks to interconnecting anyone with all human beings and their knowledge and unique speech, use of language and speaking and writing style, is the main idea of McCullochs´ revolutionary work.
Yes, I know, there are emojis, memes, hashtags, emoticons, much viral stuff that will continue forever, but I find the transformation of the way people directly interact with each other in social media, chats, comments, VR, AR, and in some rare cases, real life, much more fascinating than ;) and grumpy cat. Sorry for that, but neologisms, new slangs, diminutives, and jargon and how they collide with and change the old language, as the digital natives keep using new grammar when they become parents themselves and the before mentioned, is much more fascinating than pics and evolving smileys. I have a certain mentality regarding emojis and I will stay with it, saying: “I´ll tip and tap them. With my cold, dead hands.“ But not before.
It´s all a bit of emancipation too, because, do you know what, in my subjective opinion, is the ultimate proof of conservative stupidity? Having tens of thousands of linguists in universities all around the world that play with the rules of languages and boring, useless studies about stuff nobody is interested in while important, new, interdisciplinary, progressive fields get no funding for research in this unbelievable revolution of everything regarding human interaction since the internet began. What right and legitimation have all those anachronism custodians to cherrypick and dictate how language has to evolve, when a reform is necessary, and how one has to do grammar, yada, blah blah, and babble? The language is free, wooden girls and boys, chill a bit, open your mind for more levity in language and ethical and cultural references.
But luckily internet linguistics is starting to take off and will analyse a parallel evolution of real and digital language, how stronger languages are cannibalizing others (those poor little ones like German that suffer so much with each anglicism killing one of their old friends, oh look, now it cries) and one has to always keep in mind that we will seem as strange to future people as medieval knights and Victorian ladies seem to us today.
Regarding emojis I asked myself how the biochemical and neurological effect of it will develop if VR and AR are used by kids in some years and they are conditioned to use animations and pictures of mimic, gestures, and body language that are written into their wetware and give conversations and thoughts an extra lawyer, linking different brain regions together and, sigh, being quite useful for human evolution. But not before!
And I still won´t use them, ok!? See, an oldfashioned interrogation and exclamation mark, that´s enough emo for me. And I lold and rofld when the author was talking about a „third place to socialize“ next to work and home, if my math is right, I am still at 0, socialize my …
What amazed me the most is realizing that this living, breathing, immortal thing called language is at the moment creating new generations of language users, that this love affair between tech and blah will last forever and create exponentially more and more different manifestations, that McCulloch already defined different phases and varieties of users, that I am one of the ancient ones and finally realized that I am getting old.
So how could it happen that even not within a generation all humans have been transformed into smombies and what happens when someone stops getting peSo how could it happen that even not within a generation all humans have been transformed into smombies and what happens when someone stops getting permanent outer input and listening to all inner voices and soliloquies? Cleaning silence, awareness for each moment or, ta-da, mindfulness.
One must imagine what the extremely slight context to other topics of all this information dump does to brain, logic and mind. The focus that originates from reading a book, working, writing, thinking, etc. doesn´t come in these cases at the cost of real effort, but with easy and sweet intermittent positive reinforcement. Emotional, funny, shocking and, most important, frightening news flashes, tweets, burning hot latest news, kitten and food porn. And similar kind of as I heard a friend of a friend recently talk about.
There is pretty much capacity for getting lost in the social network dragnets controlled by ominous spiders and the desire to acquire some of those precious, pretty products and to fear some of those gritty, evil immigrant communist terrorist leftist,... grows. Again, a huge real-life experiment in how messed up brains get in as less time as possible, especially including VR, AR and more and more realistic video game graphics.
This book has a more philosophical approach than "Digital Minimalism, How to break up with your phone, etc." It´s about digging deeper, probably asking: "Hm, who could benefit from this development of tailored filter bubbles and news brought to each device." Even people who know that newspapers, TV news channels, etc. aren´t really trustworthy, tend to believe their personalized newsfeed. I mean, it comes from friends, family and is related to hobbies and all such feel-good stuff, so it can´t be that bad. Except for turning one in a permanent passive, easy to manipulate recipient of permanent mind spam that eats away lifetime.
As a solution, the author presents bioregionalism, less consumerism, more decentralization and the average suspects for a better world, but as long as humans don´t realize the grade and sophistication of media and news manipulation, those noble ideas and ideals are chanceless against glittering, glamorous gamification and shopaholism. An untrained mind is not just like a monkey, it is an easy to trick one that; OMG, I need that product I didn´t even know about now!; eats each shiny banana given by a stranger, no matter how poisonous and filled with psychoactive indoctrination drugs it might be. Now please go and click the banana like button under this objective and true review if you want more yellow enjoyment.
Nothing could, in an economic or real war, be more attractive than to be able to influence the population of all countries with internet and social meNothing could, in an economic or real war, be more attractive than to be able to influence the population of all countries with internet and social media after years of infiltrating the social networks both by manipulating trends and creating undetectable armies of millions of fake or, and that´s an unsolvable problem, real profiles or just bots and AIs. Those are already so advanced that it´s very hard to differentiate between real humans and bot armies controlled by algorithms and it will soon be impossible to detect them.
Just take AlphaGo, AlphaStar, deep fake, quantum computing, etc. and the secret AIs that may already exist, they are all unbeatable, ever faster-evolving entities and just imagine what the Indian, US and Chinese military may have in their secret cyber weapon programs. Nobody will know if the video, it´s likers, commentators, links, references, etc. are real or not and how should someone confronted with a perfect deep fake video that has been combined with social engineering, a honey trap, compromising situations (all rejected by the victim) seem credible when real photos and videos are arranged around a real situation with many witnesses?
In the past it was much easier to keep one's citizens heads clean from nasty foreign propaganda and annoying alternative political models because all one had to do was to control all printed and broadcasted media and bingo, all people's minds just filled with the right thoughts. That went well until not even 2 decades ago when those social networks started their rise to ultimate power over information and the state lost control about what the people should think and do. Now filter bubbles and echo chambers are a logical result of the business model of search engines and social networks, because clicks, views, etc. are used to sell advertisements and so the manipulation is pretty easy.
That social media thing certainly has it´s good options too, cat pictures, foodp***, etc, but because this should be a pessimistic review about a frightening topic, I will just focus on the horrible stuff and ignore the happy go lucky elements.
So the cyberwar command of a fictive country, a huge conglomerate or a multinational megacorporation starts using all those tools and the power to manipulate the headlines, discussions, hyped topics, videos, news articles, etc. by pushing just the content they want to see. But that´s just the beginning, it´s not just about spreading some bad blood or doing a little harm by manipulations that could cost a few billion or ruin the one or other company, but a new dimension of "Divide and rule" everywhere, anytime and with just one click.
What comes better than manipulating democratic elections with troll armies, haters, fake news and massive amounts of cash to push each content on all social media platforms and google searches. Anything should escalate as quickly as possible and the red lines, differences and hate between all different groups possible should grow. Democrats vs. Republicans, black people vs. white people, refugees vs. homelanders (watch The Boyzs, great series), left vs. right, conservative vs. progressive, etc. the more poisonous and hate-filled the debates, the more divided and weakened the country and its inner stability, the better. It functions great since millennia.
All that together weakens the state from inside, making it sure that the government and secret services have to stay alarmed and focused on the inner problems, on the real option of state of emergency until civil war in the case of a war or natural disaster.
That might seem exaggerated and improbable, but who has read a bit about military mind and war games, think tanks and war tactics in general knows that everything can be weaponized and nothing seems so sexy to a four-star general as just to click the button, avoiding to accidentally drop the nuke, but he sh**storm instead, probably combined with a cool quote like "Unleash the trolls!"
A small version of this total media control is the individual manipulation of search results, update feeds, trending topics, hiding certain topics and comments, make one buy buy buy stuff, hiding comments one made or the comments or answers of friends to change the context, what all together accumulates to the large scale and the mentioned bigger problems. Although sending subconscious purchase incentives, voting proposals, etc. is, of course, the hottest dream of each Orwellian agitator or PR expert.
A bit larger topic ist the misuse of social media by all kinds of extremist groups, but what ist that compared to the capabilities of superpowers. Of course the media focus is always on those 2 groups of problems, live ISIS decapitation videos, individual filter bubbles and murderers using the internet to recruit new suicide bombers to distract the public from the real cyberwar scenarios between large states, corporations and conglomerates. Even politicians and parties and all the lies are just the tip of the iceberg, because the social transformations in the background are the real deal.
A combination of cyber attacks with conventional war is a logical step, destabilizing the country to attack before a real physical invasion and to prepare the world public for a quick, easy and justified war. The preparation for the legitimization of attacks may begin months or even years before the first real battle, so that millions of likes, shares and comments may strengthen the righteousness. Clickbaiting #patrioticwar share and like
It is a problem of human nature that lies and hate tend, sexy as they are, to spread better, faster and wider than the complicated truth that may be combined with critical, objective analysis nobody who truly believes in something very very much wants to do because it could show nasty cognitive dissonances, what leads to an overrepresentation of harmful, hate-filled content and news. The ultimate goal is to, by repeating mantras as often as possible, make sure that people believe in nothing, except the contagious, poisonous web feeds, and deem everything fake news and evil propaganda that doesn´t conform the doctrine and agenda of the puppet masters.
How can any private or public supervisory body differentiate between parody, art, protest, provocation, free speech, debate, propaganda, etc. by real people or fake accounts? It is very complicated to deal with those problems, because it involves freedom of speech and free internet and each attempt to avoid infiltration and demagogic speech would destroy civil rights at the same moment so the only way might be to make all people educated and wise. Just joking, there is certainly no solution, we are doomed and the world has been transformed to a William Gibson novel. Great author, by the way, he writes nonfiction about present age topics.
There are 2 categories of people, conservative technophobes and neurologists, doctors, and brain scientists, who are ironically coming to a similar coThere are 2 categories of people, conservative technophobes and neurologists, doctors, and brain scientists, who are ironically coming to a similar conclusion: having the very strong, over millions of years developed social reward and group dynamics systems condensed in a tiny machine for 24/7 use, is a dangerous and for many people life assimilating option, opening space for the ultimate misuse of a technology that could be used for education,work, and reading is instead turned in a hedonism booster.
Psychologically, it´s more subtle than usual drugs with cold turkeys and the option to quit and never be confronted with it again, as social life seems to stay pretty attractive and living in a society of moderate users and junkies who obviously have no direct negative impact makes it difficult to argue and warns against it. It stigmatizes and isolates the Cassandras who will think twice before expressing doubts about the mature and intelligent use of social networks, opening themselves for the harsh criticism that just because they aren´t able to handle and control their online time, that doesn´t mean that the media itself is evil or that others have simply more willpower.
People interested in staying in contact with familiy, friends, and peers face other problems, such as the duty to like back, bearing spammers and permanent posters, the permanent fight against the tempation to check social media, the loss of real-life time with humans, being a bad paragon for the own kids, being transparent for government and companies, the unclear long term effects of more and more emissions, and the question how useful the idealization and celebration of trivial and redundant small talk and superficiality may be. There would be so many social collaboration and working networks, wikis, specialized networks in general, Reddit, etc., that can help to learn new skills, specializing, and especially giving and getting knowledge and having productive communications instead of endless idiot trash talk drivel.
TV was already pretty influential and lucrative, not to forget the addictive factor, but the new technology enabling everyone to tailer her/his own ultimate hobby entertainment fun feed, while pseudo actively participating and forming it and the ones of others, is just seemingly free and innocent fun. The companies don´t just sell products, but ideologies and political agendas in subtle ways, bringing new problems for democratic participation and opinion formation, using the consumer as their malleable product sold to advertisers and the dark entities in the background boo, conspiracy. Printed political ads and radio and TV campaign commercials were easy to identify, except for people hooked on getting indoctrinated and mind penetrated by bigoted demagogues, but the new league of disguised manipulation by posting fake news, documentaries and bot army troll opinions makes the electoral arms race impossible to control, especially when looking at states secretly influencing the elections in other countries. Not even mentioning the more sinister power balances and struggles inside countries shadow governments, think tanks, and camouflaged secret reptilian alien overlords.
A nice bonus feature of turning human social interaction in an obsessive compulsive disorder with bipolar manic depressive disorder elements of highs for popularity and downs for feeling inferior in comparison to the splendid lives of all others, permanently happy people. I have the huge advantage of not socializing at all, but I imagine it very difficult to handle for people without strong preferences for introversion and happy self-isolation.
I believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-FI believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-Fi authors point in this direction and because it is a logical and to a certain extent necessary step for both government and industry.
We are not at the end of history, but probably at the end of new ways to control the information highways. Augmented reality, virtual reality and invasive techniques to participate better and more efficient all won´t change the fact that there will always be an underlying network, internet, LAN, intelligent tree roots or whatever that connect the participants. There will be standards and competitors and the best product will be used by most customers.
One can argue if it is good or bad if all this power lies in the hands of a few people, but in a democratic state the control of all content to avoid extremism up to a dictatorship is something simply necessary and the line between too much and too less censorship is so thin and difficult to draw that it may be good that machines will do the job. Probably they are more objective and less prone do party principles and so the endless circle of corruption between lobbyists, government and dominating industries will go on forever even more efficient.
Former industries fell because they are, compared to today's standard, inflexible and unilateral, not so say boring. Just radio, just a rigid TV program, just an offline PC game, come on. Not as if TV- and radio stations, news corporations, etc. would learn from the past and try to modernize themselves. Even if they would really want to, they would have to cannibalize themselves, because their push media program without active user participation is oldfashioned. If they would change, the whole subvention circle and political interests in official, state-owned propaganda stations would collapse and the information monopoly would have to be reconsidered. They would have to allow active evaluation by users and let people produce critical, true content, to them better-known as fake news. Pest or cholera, they lose whatever they do.
And there are antitrust laws, the youth has the best potential to connect and act together, old ideas become more and more ridiculous and pathetic and the human participation in important decisions becomes less and less. And for me, as a friendly technocratic science adorer, this ist the most important point. Automate everything and if someone has a problem with it, give her/him a history book.
Sure there are some ideas to democratize the whole internet, open-source, sharing economy, creative commons, etc. But a national and global standard, infrastructure and supervisory authority will always be needed to let the whole system run and fix problems. I am a proponent of democratic and social innovations and a fairer economic system, but I also see the importance of a master administrator with different kill switches.
And one must be realistic, each free and great idea gets commercialized in a certain amount of time and the only viable option is to make the best compromise between civil society and big money. Net neutrality and transparency must be prioritized with the help of techniques like open government and blockchain technology or the worst possible moloch, as seen in China, may arise. An indestructible super behemoth, with tentacles like an app as WeChat https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat that combines the worst mixture of totalitarian and turbocapitalistic ideas together and forces everyone to use it for daily life.
The development of manipulation tools is described from medieval times until now and while the oldfashioned methods, from snake oil salesmen to war prThe development of manipulation tools is described from medieval times until now and while the oldfashioned methods, from snake oil salesmen to war propaganda, until the beginning of the 20th century may seem obvious, the methods have meanwhile improved so far that nobody can be sure to be unmanipulated any more. From film to TV, personal computer, smartphone and whatever the next step will be, I tip on bio-digital fusion with tech.
As the most interesting aspect, I will pick the manipulation of social media, search results, update feeds and personal ads, because they combine all, good working, methods with the possibilities of technology.
The social aspect, be it in small, family groups or a whole city or nation, is directly triggering very old mechanisms. And no matter where someone is on the spectrum of ideology and political beliefs, the algorithms will feed him and his friends with news, books, ideas and products (as far that that is possible in this more metaphysical context) to deepen the belief and form the famous filter bubble. And people love to invest some amount of time to produce free content on all platforms to enrich the owner and get nothing from it but followers, subscribers, likes and in a very few cases, real monetization. Hm, I feel something like a bit of suppressed self-irony at this moment, strange. And as an extra, the users are turned in products that are sold to companies by the platform owners with the promise to keep them hanging on the infusion of endless consumerism by feeding them personalized commercials.
For learning and work, it may be handy to do more looks over the fence of one´s profession and not specialize more and more. But you know, learning new things is very hard work and improving on things one is already an expert in is much quicker and easier more satisfying and easy-going. So the AI doesn´t want one to sweat and gives more and more detailed information about a favorite topic instead of helping to improve the interdisciplinary approaches.
Finally, the own self, defined by hobbies, interests, activities. How did we tend to get ideas before this internet thing escalated so quickly? Recommendations by friends and family, to certain point coincidences, but certainly not chosen by a higher entity. Now what could fit and be liked is suggested with the help of the collected behavioral data of million alter egos with the same interests. It is great on the one hand, because it saves time, brings better results and the option to connect with others with the same interest easily. On the other hand, unlisted, unrated and not suggested content will never get spread, which opens the option of a preemptive censorship system.
Related problems are memory and attention span. Try to check how much you try to remember, instead of googling it. How long the focus can be held on one topic when online without new ideas and impulses plopping up like banner ads in your mind. Lovely ads of course, but quite creepy, especially because the machinery is even so sophisticated to add extra fails and wrong suggestion so that one doesn´t find it so disturbing that a machine knows so much about one, more than a loved one and probably more than oneself.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
Mario the lone bookwolf
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