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According to Simon Parkin writing in The Guardian, author Mark Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design “deliberately shape our experiences”, exerting “such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another”.
The Chaos Machine is an essential book for our times - Ezra Klein
The Chaos Machine is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. ... Google Books
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The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher review – how social media rewired our world.jpg)
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"I joined Twitter in the apparently halcyon days of 2009, before Brexit, Sandy Hook denial, Covid-19 conspiracy-mongering, and the livestreaming of police brutality. At that time, it felt like a school playground: you larked about with like-minded individuals, made charming acquaintances and laughed at the antics of the resident show-offs. Maybe, for someone, somewhere, that version of social media still exists. But probably not.. .
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In The Chaos Machine, New York Times reporter Max Fisher attempts to chart the development of these familiar and contradictory forces from the time of Facebook’s launch in 2004. Since then, the site has expanded from a dorm-room project for rating the attractiveness of female students to the world’s third most visited website, with the unregulated power to move fringe conspiracy theories toward the mainstream, elect governments on the back of misinformation and even, according to UN human rights experts, play a “determining role” in genocide in Myanmar.
Fisher has enjoyed more access than most. In 2018 he received a stash of documents from a Facebook contractor-turned-whistleblower (named Jacob, in the book) that purported to reveal the inadequacy of the social network’s moderation policies. Facebook duly invited Fisher to its offices to sit in on high-level meetings. This level of insight, he writes, left him alternating “between sympathy for and scepticism of Facebook’s policy overlords”.
[. . .] He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness”, leveraging that flaw to “gain user attention and increase time on the platform”. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that “supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict” – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum.
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In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity. Simultaneously, we are not built for the omniscience social media affords, making us party to every tragedy and triumph across the world in real time. Fisher likens the platforms to the cigarette manufactures of the 60s, claiming not to understand why people might be concerned about the impact of their products. At some point we’ll look back on these days in bewilderment."
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Social media can inflame your emotions — and it's a byproduct of its design.jpg)
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NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine, about how social media companies leverage content that elicits anger and outrage to keep users engaged on their platforms.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
If you feel like checking social media leaves you feeling angrier and more outraged, that's not your imagination. Max Fisher has covered the impact of social media around the world for The New York Times, from genocide in Myanmar to COVID misinformation in the U.S. And in his new book, "The Chaos Machine," he describes how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up.
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MAX FISHER: (Reading) Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day, of which you have time to read about a hundred. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing and outraged. And so do you. At the same time, less innately engaging forms of content - truth, appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance - become more and more outmatched like stars over Times Square.
SHAPIRO: That's Max Fisher reading from "The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story Of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds And Our World." Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED...
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