social media – Innocent Investor

November 7, 2021

by Steve Stofka

“This will go on your permanent record, young man,” my fifth grade teacher told me. As children we struggle to envision next month. A permanent record sounds like more than a month, for sure. Throughout our lives, we will buy goods and services and interact with others who are strangers. That requires a lot of trust and trust depends on reputation, a permanent record that companies, institutions and politicians work hard to shape. In the thirty years since the dawn of the internet, we are flooded with information, most of which has no reputation. We can only trust the institutions or people that relay that information to us. How do they build their reputations?

In Carlsbad, New Mexico is a series of one hundred underground caves that forms the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. During a tour, the guide turns off the lights and visitors stand in total darkness. Our vision dominates our navigation through the world. Without it we gather in other data, the sound of a throat clearing, the scuffle of a sneaker on the path through the cavern. We become aware of the musty smell of water trickling down through the rock and the smell of bodies nearby. We may notice the sound of our own heartbeat or pay attention to our toes inside our shoes.

Then the guide turns on a flashlight and we turn our heads to notice whatever the beam of light falls on. We notice the ripple and folds of rock, the different textures and colors of that one spot which the flashlight beam illuminates. How quickly we brush aside all this other sense information that we were just experiencing. Several visitors remarked on this phenomenon. Most of us organize our world primarily through sight.

The screen on our computers or phones is our attention flashlight. Through a series of algorithms Facebook, search engines and social media have learned to tune that light to our interests, our values, what we treasure and what is a threat to us. What engages our emotions or enrages our sensibilities? What music, clothes, activities do we like? They learn our habits and preconceptions, then feed us information that fits those preconceptions because they want us to linger. Just don’t go away, they say. The algorithms don’t care whether capitalism is good or bad, Republicans or Democrats, whether hip-hop is better than soul. All that matters is that we watch the screen and shine our flashlight on the nearby ads. Our attention is the product.

The Industrial Revolution spurred the need for standardization, for the making of products and machines with interchangeable parts (Mass Production, 2021). Human labor is not easily standardized so the task itself must be standardized so that human labor can be harnessed to the task. Generalization leads to specialization and this makes people more productive (Heilbroner, 1997, 80). More productivity leads to higher wages and greater consumption.

Beginning in the 19^th century, mass marketing grew into a powerful tool when TV gained wide popularity after World War 2. Media outlets had vague information on the tastes of their audience but ads were a scattershot approach to reach consumers. The advertiser’s message would often fall on deaf ears because the advertiser didn’t know much about me, my unique combination of tastes, my interests and desires. They promoted their products and services, their reputation.

The media giants now have a permanent record of my attention history and buying habits. My unique combination of preferences has been sliced and diced into standardized characteristics that are important to an advertiser. A giant corporation becomes like the proprietor of a general store in a small town. They know my opinions, the news I read, the sports I like and the shows I watch. This digital reputation has become my permanent record.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Heilbroner, R. L. (1997). Teachings from the worldly philosophy. New York, NY: Norton & Company.

Mass Production. (2021). Retrieved November 6, 2021, from Scholastic Grolier Online. https://go.scholastic.com/content/schgo/D/article/100/031/10003161.html

February 7, 2021

by Steve Stofka

On C-Span’s Washington Journal call-in show, I heard a caller say that they were glad to see the government back at work. The show allows callers to briefly say their peace. Roughly half of the people in this country don’t want the government in Washington to work, half do. Because of the show’s early morning airtime, callers in the eastern time zone are overrepresented and most are mature. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, most appreciate the show’s unfiltered approach.

The Greek philosopher Plato observed that we are social creatures by nature. Each of us has the capability of reasoning – it is the distinguishing feature of human beings – but an individual walks around in a cloud of misperception. Only through dialog with our neighbors do we arrive at some universal truths.

Indoctrinated since childhood in an egalitarian, individualistic society, we reject this “group think,” but the founders of Facebook and Twitter have made billions creating a social platform for us to interact. Whether we unfriend a family member on Facebook or engage in a spirited debate with a stranger on Twitter, we are demonstrating the Platonic notion that we try to arrive at truths in our dialog with others. The Social Dilemma documentary explores the techniques of manipulation by those who wrote the code.

Some people hate capitalism. “It turns people into numbers!” We don’t think of money as a dialog. Bitcoin is worth $40,000 or it is worthless. The marketplace is a dialog. There is a group of “investors” on Reddit who are one-share owners of the volatile stock GameStop. One share. When one investor sold his shares – he had much more than one – he missed the sense of community with others. Yes, he had made several hundred thousand dollars, but he felt as though he had betrayed the community by selling.

We are human beings with big brains, but our fundamental character is that of individuals in a monkey troop. We assess danger by looking at our neighbors. Are others afraid or is it me? This berry tastes good. Has anyone else gotten sick eating it? We may choose to isolate ourselves from the group, but we don’t like to be isolated by the group.

In Star Trek: TNG, a race of cybernetic beings act as a hive of bees, a collective coordinated in thought and action. They convert U.S.S. Enterprise Captain Picard into a Borg member to communicate with other humans. Picard must endure the withdrawal of the Borg implants and never fully recovers from the psychological wounds of being part of that collective.

Plato’s take on this process is different. We communicate with and understand the world through the group. We are like the Borg in that sense, a collective of creatures, whose distinctive feature is their reasoning. We are intrigued by the social life of bees and ants, who use chemical clues and dancing to inform their fellows about the world.

Bees dance. Ants share chemicals. We dance by talking and writing, by tapping on our phones. We aren’t sensitive to pheromones, so we wear clothes and adopt lifestyles that signal our position in the group. In the new world of tech and social media, the chemicals we share are our data: what we ate, what we bought, what our moods are.

What do Plato and social programming engineers at Facebook have in common? We are Borg. We form a social contract not because it is convenient but because it is in our nature.

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Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash