TL;DR

• Technology is only becoming more integrated into society

• Social media is a battleground for a warfare of ideas, attention and power

  • I like the framing of it as psychological warfare

• Shaping technology for good isn’t only a responsibility of the users it’s also a responsibility of the designers.

  • we must invite moral and ethical conversations into the picture if we are going to have a chance for technology to be used in an empowering way

• The problem is complex, but with enough complex collective force I believe we have a chance at shaping technology for the benefit of all.

Recently I’ve come to a few conclusions. 👇

1️⃣ Technology is here to stay

2️⃣ Technology will only become more powerful going forward

• 💬 It's affecting increasingly more intimate domains: our emotions, actions, relationships, worldviews, intentions, and motivations

3️⃣ Technology is largely shaping us in negative ways

4️⃣ Technology needs to radically change

There’s an urgency I feel in working to shape technology for good. I feel innovation is not only possible, but deeply needed to course correct technology and it’s current impact on humanity. Furthermore, the rise and popularity of ChatGPT is making this question even more urgent.

A few article by the Consilience Project have largely inspired these conclusions: It's a MAD Information War and Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design.

💣 The New Battleground: Psychological Warfare 💬

Our minds are the battlegrounds of the 21st century war, and our heart-strings are in the crossfires.

It’s somewhat difficult to even know that we’re on the battleground because, well it’s a psychological war zone. One that instills hatred, polarization and emotional distress into the hearts of our friends and families alike.

It’s implications can be felt when scrolling endlessly through twitter, tik tok and instagram alike.

📈 Business Models of the Internet Age 💻

Just think about the business models of facebook and google. Our attention is the product, and our minds are the battleground. 🧠 For the advertisers, it’s a race to control our thoughts and behavior. 🔧

They know us better than we know ourselves, and they’re using that power against us. We no longer have control of where we spend our money and what type of content we consume. 📖

It’s all up to the algorithms now. All of the (advertiser) money goes to that platform that is most effective in getting us to buy things we don’t even need. 💸 Another way of putting it is, psychological warfare is the business model of all internet platforms. The world is now governed by memes and beliefs as opposed to labor and brute force power.

We may take it as normal life, but nothing about this is normal. The problem is that not they’re hiding the truth from us in some grand surveillance conspiracy theory. It’s that we’re spiraling into bullshit. The truth is becoming more and more irrelevant because tik tok and instagram have captured our time and attention, the equivalent of information junk food. 📺🍭

🐦 Twitter and Bots 🤖

I don’t know what to think about Russian bots and all that, but I am noticing that artificial intelligence is becoming so advanced that determining what is real and what is fake is challenging.

AI can now pop out hyper-realistic deep fake videos that are nearly indistinguishable from real people talking. Check out this 60 minutes clip for more. 👇

Furthermore, discerning real twitter accounts from fake twitter accounts is also a challenge we’re going to need to learn how to navigate going forward.

📲 Tech Platforms as the Terrain of Information Warfare 🏜️

In It's a MAD Information War Daniel Schmactenberger and the Consilience Project team writes:

All of this makes me feel that getting better at making sense of the internet and learning how to better navigate the complexity of information online is an urgent matter.

Given that the social media tools are becoming increasingly powerful, we must build increasingly powerful digital sensemaking tools to keep up. It seems to me that the best way to engage with the internet is not to consume more information, but to learn the skill of curation and relevance realization.

💬 What Does Good Tech Look Like? ❤️

As a response to these realizations I've had to continually ask myself what a more generative technological environment could look like.

As the Consilience Project laid out, this information war is being waged on the tech platforms that each one of us use each and every day. Perhaps beginning to perceive and relate to the information that we're digesting on these platforms differently is a decent start.

I believe that diving into the different aspects of the good will benefit us here in our goal of learning how to use technology for more virtuous ends.

🤝 Components of the Good

A few obvious components of good include:

👉 moral repsonsibility

👉 decreased brainwashing

👉 increased compassion

👉 supporting the internalization and understanding of other's perspectives

👉 a healthier epistemic commons

👉 better shared sensemaking (including better tools that support sensemaking)

👉 better tools for shared meaning making (escaping the collective entrapment in moral relativism and nihilism)

How we go about accomplishing this is an entirely different conversation. Yet, the goal I have with this article is to get clear on the what and the why so that the how is all that's left.

That being said, what if we started from these parameters from the bottom-up. Let’s say that we’re part of a team engaged in building and promoting a new social platform, perhaps we can instill these components of the good into the core design of these new products. Rather than being naive techno-optimists.

👩‍🏫 Learning Better Sensemaking Online

Second, learning how to learn better is important in today's digital information madness. 🤬

Once we realize that the complexity of information online is just too much to handle, the skill of sensemaking stands out as the logical next step. By sensemaking I mean: how do I best navigate the information shitstorm that is the internet. 🌪️

Rather than always trying to catch up on the information flow coming in, what if there were skills we could learn to make us more adaptive to the internet itself. What if we could better sense into the info-space and determine what is relevant and what is not, then merely consume what’s important and happily miss out on all the rest. 🚶‍♂️

🏛️ Moral Responsibility 🙏

Given that the world we live in is increasingly being governed by an ethos of moral relativism, it's difficult to know how to show up virtuously. It seems that we have to start from ground zero and discover our core virtues from scratch. We may call this is the start of moral responsibility.

Moral responsibility has been thought about in a religious context (especially Christian), but it doesn't have to be a purely religious act. We can strive to incorporate ethics into our relationship and creation of technology without bringing outdated religious value structures in with it.

Moral Responsibility requires that we stop accepting the assumption of moral relativity. Jamie Wheal says it best when he writes:

By morality I'm referring to ethic and the good. Perhaps we can, once again, engage in conversations and contemplations around what a good world look like.

All the way back to Socrates we see an emphases on contemplating morality as a core principle of the good life.

In her book, Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows writes:

I'm not sure how to bring ethics back into technology, but I imagine that bringing it forth as a topic of conversation and bringing it into technological design sessions is a good start.

✅ Conclusion

All in all, technology is a beast that no single person alone can tackle. We need to face this goliath as a collective. Some say we’re inevitably headed towards a technological singularity, others think that it’s the end of us. I’d like to hold out hope and think that humans are versatile enough to adapt to the challenges that the technological era has put ahead of us.

Thanks for reading :)