Gamed and abused, WWW is not a free market of information
Jaron Lanier, the eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist (...) mentions “psychological operatives” working for (...) state apparatus. All of them are filtering or promoting information for their own gains. In short, the web is not a free market of information as originally envisioned. It is a gamed system being rampantly abused.
(...) Lanier draws attention to Harvard psychologist BF Skinner’s theories of “operant conditioning”, or behavior controlled by its consequences, otherwise known as behavior modification, a term coined in 1937. (...) Approval, disapproval or being ignored, such techniques can be manipulated online as part of what is euphemistically called “engagement” and the creation of addictive patterns for individuals and then – by proxy – eventually whole societies. (...) Once distinct personalities, he wrote, each had “veered into being bratty little boys” in their public behavior – a result perhaps of being “Twitter poisoned”, a more contemporary term for operant conditioning. “I have noticed that all these people converge on a similar personality type that wasn’t present before. If that has something to do with social media addictions, or Twitter poisoning, what is that?” he wrote. (...) “(...) I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”
‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity (Sun 27 Nov 2022 09.00 GMT).
The American computer scientist, who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’ cautions against online ‘psychological operatives’
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