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Notes -
I was given Yuaval Noah Harari's book Nexus as a gift. It's quite relevant.
You can tell that a certain faction of 'Elite Human Capital' are working hard to find justifications for clampdowns on information. He constantly re-emphasises that truth is not necessarily as useful for creating and preserving social order as fiction, that naively propagating freedom of information can be a breeding ground for dangerous ideas. He apportions a good chunk of blame for Myanmar having a civil war on Facebook algorithms which strikes me as a gross simplification. He says that democratic means can achieve evil ends - Hitler was voted in. And maybe if the commies had modern AI technology it would be possible to run an economy centrally and thus achieve global totalitarianism. The answer to preserving our Correct Social Values of anti-racism, feminism and liberal democracy is unclear, who knows how to do it or what compromises will be made, Yuval says. But it is key to identify that freedom of speech and information is increasingly becoming unhelpful in this new environment and should not be a core value. There should be a conversation between people to achieve democratic governance but somehow the conversation needs to be managed to prevent bad outcomes by law and various institutional mechanisms. Managed Democracy.
I wouldn't mischaracterize the book as being invalid, it's more along the lines of 'here is a perfectly valid argument for why I (and people like me) should have more power and you should have less' which may indeed be perfectly valid but is still somewhat dubious, given the interests of those making the argument.
The Facebook blame for Myanmar sounds a lot like the justification for Trump and Christian Nationalists and MAGA gaining support via social media. It couldn’t possibly be that people were choosing crime-think when given freedom to choose, it must be the algorithm (and you better change it to support the neoliberal ideology or else) or Russia (who somehow manages to look and sound like ordinary white Americans dissatisfied with The Narrative) or literally anything other than “they don’t like us”.
The problem is that you can’t use an algorithm to push things that are not happening. Nor can you get support for ideas that are not at least latently relevant and popular in the base of users. I don’t believe for a second that you could use the algorithm to push Americans to start pushing Buddhist Nationalism— Theres no organic support for that, as few Americans are Buddhist or interested in becoming Buddhist, and even among those who are, there’s no support for the idea of Buddhists controlling the government. There is support for Christianity and Christian Nationalism in America that comes from the bottom up. It’s existed for a while. The entire Pro Life movement was predicated on the idea that God forbids abortion and that Christians should do what they can to end it because God forbids it and God is above government. Opposition to gay rights, while not as successful (so far) runs along the same lines — God forbids it, so we must oppose it. Immigration opposition is likewise organic. If the general public was happy about immigration you simply cannot spread anti-immigrant sentiment among the public. But people see the results so when it pops up on social media, they agree with it.
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