Context: Facebook to take action against users repeatedly sharing misinformation To be quite frank, this (and all interdictions like it) merely treat symptoms, regardless of sincerity, conscientiousness or any plausible resemblance to aspirational efficacy. One of the key problems we face in the problem of disinformation is that of foundationally misconstruing the nature of the […]
Context: Facebook blocks Australian users from viewing or sharing news I have not used Facebook for years and it is not at all missed. It says a lot for just how rapidly and reflexively people come to depend on the integrated communications systems of “social networks” that the threat of removing access to algorithmically-shaped biases […]
Context: http://www.politicalcompass.org This kind of test resonates with precisely the kind of personality assessments that Cambridge Analytica so successfully exploited. I’m not asserting that any inadvertent conspiratorial undercurrent exists in this instance but there may be (other) rich philosophical seams of insight to be mined here. Notice that an observational, participatory metric and expression of […]
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]
Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]
Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]
The kind of puzzle indicated here are commonly associated with a genre of social media clickbait that often leads down a steep rabbit-hole of commercial datapoint acquisition. Cambridge Analytica’s artful gullbility-harvesting tests were a case in point and emphasise a significant correlation between (personal) online identity-construction and the production of an implicit informational value around […]
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
Facebook has a genocide problem.
Corporate power in the technology domain is a complex cartography but it is not indecipherable. It takes intelligence and subtlety to address the problem of autonomously self-propagating information systems that have grown too large, too fast and in all of this speed and runaway self-replication represent something of an atavistic return to a state of accelerated reproduction which in cells occurs in (or as) cancer.
Sometimes the most profound truths (or at the very least – facts) emerge not from what does exist, but from what does not.
