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We all wear tinfoil hats now

thenewatlantis.com

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Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#11

Post by raxxorrax »

pjc50 wrote: post #6

Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics. I hate t…

Careful, the hammer of logic is quite small. It is a mighty but very restricted tool.

Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation.

What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of people and influenced their voting behavior?

These questions were just left unanswered.

Additionally and maybe a completely different angle, but rational society doesn't mean that much.

The criticism in your link seems valid, but I see it can be applied to the behavior described in the original article.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#12

Post by thesaint »

Cambridge Analytica and facebook responsible for manipulating voters. Don't make me laugh. The BBC has been doing much, much worse for years and the establishment fully supported their actions. The voters had enough more like...

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#13

Post by pjc50 »

raxxorrax wrote: post #11
pjc50 wrote: post #6

Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics. I hate t…

Careful, the hammer of logic is quite small. It is a mighty but very restricted tool. Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation. What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of peop…

I think the distinction I was looking for was between statements like "advertising affects behaviour" and "propaganda affects behaviour" which, in the 21st century, are generally considered true and almost obvious even if we can't identify the specific pump handle to remove to stop the cholera epidemic; versus "wifi is beaming images into my brain".

Certainly "person X made a political decision based on the information they saw on the TV news and on Facebook, despite that information being either false or grossly misleading" isn't delusional in the same way that "person X made a political decision because the electromagnetic radiation of wifi disrupted their mind" is.

(I can sort of see if I squint how they're drawing an analogy between being affected by having images "beamed into your head" via some kind of scifi process and the plain old regular one of having them beamed to some kind of screen then interpreted by your eyes into images which have an effect on your mental and emotional state. But the former is witchcraft and the latter is media studies.)

> rational society doesn't mean that much

Only if you care about, say, coronavirus, and taking evidence-based interventions like handwashing rather than faith-based or panic-based ones.

Edit: someone downthread has provided the name of Bernays that I was thinking of and couldn't remember.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#14

Post by atoav »

raxxorrax wrote: post #11
pjc50 wrote: post #6

Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics. I hate t…

Careful, the hammer of logic is quite small. It is a mighty but very restricted tool. Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation. What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of peop…

Wouldn't a rational society also deal with likely and possible scenarios?

Targeted advertisement in social media is seen as something that works, because someone has a huge interest in convincing someone else that it does (although I wouldn't be surprised if it really works). And if you move conventional targeted ads to the political space you get Cambridge analytica.

And a rational society could have multiple problems with this regardless of whether it works. Elections are public for a reason — shouldn't the official party lead advertisement then also be public?

I see a strong case of banning targeted personal political ads purely based on that.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#15

Post by vanderZwan »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #10
vanderZwan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact. I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don'…

We should definitely pause ! We are steady but surely moving towards the very dystopia made up by paranoid minds ages ago. I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. It's crazy to me that it's still legal to have political advertising, heck, it's crazy to me that advertising in it's current form is legal at all.

> I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded.

Huh, I admit that I ended up skimming a bit near the end but my impression of the first half of article was the opposite: that these fears weren't unfounded precisely because the current reality of advertising matches the imaginations of the paranoid.

Guess I should go back and reread the rest more carefully.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#16

Post by atoav »

llcoolv wrote: post #2

This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.

For me there is a difference tho: when the Guardian does it, it is public. That means if your political view differs from that of the Guardian you can still read it, comment it, write an article in another outlet about it. So basically: you are creating public political discourse about it.

In targeted advertisement no such public space exists and political discourse on the ads is hard. A political party could target your kid with disgusting lies while you will never know (and therefore discuss) it. Whole groups within a society can be told things without scrutiny. With targeted ads scrutiny can only happen, if the targeting algorithm chose the wrong person and that person chose to bring it to the public.

Anything that makes political discourse and advertisement more public and less private is in the self interest of democracy. Anything that makes it harder for parties to promise mutually exclusive or unrealistic things to multiple people is in the self interest of democracy.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#17

Post by atoav »

walrus01 wrote: post #9

If you look at examples of mental illness in non technological cultures, delusions manifest as djinns, demons, succubus and so forth. I once had the opportunity to discuss this with a journalist who spent some time researching and reporting on mental hospitals in Afghanistan. Some of the people at the facilities they visited were deeply disturbed, so the extent that their families had resorted to tying them to a tree…

Narratives of forces who yield great power while beeing invisible lend themselves perfectly to improvisational backdrops for mental illness.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#18

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

vanderZwan wrote: post #15
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should definitely pause ! We are steady but surely moving towards the very dystopia made up by paranoid minds ages ago. I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. It's crazy to me that it's still legal to have political advertising, heck, it's crazy to me that advertising in it's current form is legal at all.

> I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. Huh, I admit that I ended up skimming a bit near the end but my impression of the first half of article was the opposite: that these fears weren't unfounded precisely because the current reality of advertising matches the imaginations of the paranoid. Guess I should go back and reread the rest more carefully.

Maybe i should too !

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#19

Post by KarlKemp »

llcoolv wrote: post #2

This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.

You’re equating things that... just aren’t the same? Deutsche Welle and the BBC, for example, were set up and are continually monitored by somewhat functioning democracies. This grants them legitimacy, and also has the side effect of making goals, structures, and processes a matter of public knowledge.

That isn’t a minor difference. It’s the same mechanism by which the superficially similar action of child protective services is still fundamentally different from a child abductor.

Motives also matter: Encouraging people to vote is different from stoking frustration with democracy intended to discourage voting. You’re operating from some definition of democracy where all opinions are equal, and where any judgements of the merits is un-democratic “bias”. But that’s some sort of naive misunderstanding of democracy, sort of a perverted parody of postmodern relativism. Not only is it legitimate for journalists and others to operate on the assumption of the fundamental superiority of democracy vs authoritarianism, it is necessary for it to function.

Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now

#20

Post by deltron3030 »

Cultural authority got decentralized over centuries, from church to bible to traditional media to new media, where everybody can be an author and become an authority, gain a fellowship.

Peoples obedience to authority didn't change much in general, it's an instinct for survival, it makes the surrounding society and feedback from a society more predictable.

Online bubbles are often subcultures that predate the web, what changed is that many of them became more attractive or commercially viable through independence of location, new viable markets linked to a return of investment, which of course motivates virtual landgrabs and people defending their territory.

It's not a suprise that most online communities have their own authors and authorities, stores, books and conferences, their own terminology or language, their own culture/church basically. It's even obvious within niches like programming. Coming up in such a community is linked to wealth. If you're seen in church and competitors not, churchgoers will likely buy from you.

Abolishing cultural independence would lead to a China 2.0, cultural authority in hands of the state. Likely less innovation caused by a lack of cultural diversity, less motivation to invest into land that's already been grabbed by others.

How can the problems that are likely caused by cultural independence be solved without fully centralizing cultural authority? Can something like a driver license for the web even be possible or be fair?

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