Bumps on the Road to the Global Hive Mind
Immersive, Intelligent Social Media Are Inevitable, Despite The Horrible Dysfunction of Today’s Platforms
The promise was dazzling: A vast web connecting every human being to the world’s greatest art, literature and scientific thought; democratic platforms promoting community and the social and political empowerment of billions of highly educated global citizens.
The reality, not so much: Nazis and revenge porn and stalkers and ludicrous conspiracy theories; the amplification and weaponization of the worst and dumbest of our species.
So, our conundrum: Digital social network technologies represent an important milestone in our civilization’s advancement towards ever greater global communication and community. Yet our actual social network companies seem to be run by amoral sociopaths and their platforms often enable and promote the nastiest aspects of humanity, from human trafficking to racial and religious bigotry to egregious privacy breaches to horrific teen bullying to violent political insurrection.
Is there a solution? What does it look like? Do today’s alarming headlines and trends spell the Facebook-mediated end to functional democracy, or are they mere speed-bumps and potholes on the road to a more peaceful, enlightened and integrated global village?
Before addressing this question, let’s take a step back. As a futurist and fan of both history and science fiction, I like to take the long view, to see the big picture; to analyze the underlying trends and drivers of a phenomenon; to understand where it comes from and where it leads. So a key question is: WHY do we all apparently WANT to connect online?
Psychological and Economic Drivers of Social Media Engagement
Looking back at human history, one sees an almost teleological drive to transcend our geographic distances, our cultural and linguistic differences. Invasions, caravans, explorers and trade routes; inter-tribal arranged marriages and clan alliances; city-states, nation-states and ambassadors between them; the printing press, books, newspapers, the Pony Express; telegraphs, radio, television, the internet …
What explains this drive, and where does it all lead?
Of course there were often practical advantages of each incremental improvement in communications technology — better marketing of goods and services; more efficient mobilization and coordination of armies.
Evolutionary selection, whether biological, socio-political or economic, favors effective communication between intelligent agents. Just as insects and plants evolved chemical means of communicating through air or soil, so too would tool-using primates eventually learn to communicate through wires, fiberoptic cables, through the air and even through the vacuum of space.
But beyond the pragmatic advantages there also seems to be simply a deep human drive to be heard, to share ideas, to touch other human souls. Are Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and Twitter just transitory fads, mere milestones on the long road from cuneiform tablets to a sort of fully connected global mind, à la Gaia/Galactica in Asimov’s Foundation books? (Or will the road to a hive mind end in a more dystopian destination, like Star Trek’s Borg collective?)
Eyeballs, Algorithms and Value Propositions
Pragmatically, something like Facebook and Twitter was probably inevitable with the rise of the internet. Think about it — the social media value proposition is compelling, at least on a narrow short-term basis for some individuals and corporate entities:
- Users find a way to connect with family and friends, or with like-minded people anywhere; to hear and be heard. And it’s typically “free” (if you don’t count the costs in time, productivity, mental health and the erosion of functioning democracies).
- Advertisers find ways to micro-target their desired demographic segments and stream customized ads to them, greatly enhancing response rates and ROI over more traditional mass media channels.
- Site owners make money by selling their users — and their users’ private data and psychological profiles — to advertisers. (“If the app is free, YOU are the product!”, remains an internet truism).
In order to ensure that this financial gravy train keeps running, social media companies have employed psychology PhDs and AI experts to develop algorithms that keep their users hooked, that “keep eyeballs on the screen”. (Pundits have noted that the term “user” applies equally to people on social media as to people on crystal meth).
These algorithms decide which posts or videos you see next, and they’re honed to choose something that escalates your emotional investment. It turns out that sexual titillation, fear and hatred generate the strongest responses, as Charles Darwin and E.O. Wilson would easily predict from evolutionary theory, and as con artists and demagogues know instinctively. Chasing after that next dopamine rush — like bleary-eyed gamblers at the slot machines in Las Vegas — leads too easily to amygdala hijack when the content is calculated to incite.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.”
— Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder
Everyone Is an Author, er, Content Creator
The WorldWide Web and social media enabled the broad masses to become authors, video producers, citizen scientists, citizen journalists — and, unfortunately, to become citizen demagogues, citizen disinformation agents and citizen terrorist leaders. And they enabled already talented demagogues — like lifelong con artist Donald Trump — to step up their game, amplify their lies, reach more dupes.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world was automatically going to be a better place.
I was wrong about that”Evan Williams, Twitter Cofounder
Unfortunately some of the same aspects of human psychology and economics that drive the positive value propositions also drive the dystopian aspects of our digital social world. As the line from the Batman movie has it, “Some men just want to watch the world burn”. The psychopathic, the immature and the overstressed like to scream, to attack, to stalk, to vent their id on the rest of us. And so the corrupt and malevolent find in the internet and social media newly efficient ways to monetize and weaponize human weakness, ignorance and evil. “Humans are hackable”, warns foresight/business consultant Stephen Fanjoy, and therefore so are human political systems.
Are There Solutions?
What can be done about all these problems with digital social media?
First, let’s just admit that the major platform companies are simply not going to fix themselves. An intricate pantomime of reform plays out in Washington, Brussels and other capitals after every major whistleblower revelation. Half-hearted apologies and promises are ritually offered in order to stave off real regulations or penalties; maybe a few of the most toxic personalities and pernicious disinformation memes are temporarily banned; public service messages are algorithmically inserted after some posts. (“Covid19 infection is real.” “Tom Hanks does not actually eat babies.” “Genocide is bad.”)
The Free Speech defense is waved around, as if the Constitutional right of people to be bigots, kooks and morons requires every private company to host those bigots, kooks and morons and to publish everything they spew. (As someone who has built NLP-AI systems, I know that the major social media platforms could do better at detecting and deleting such garbage). At the end of the day, it’s all about eyeballs, ad click-through rates, revenues and share price. If democracy, societal cohesion and mental health aren’t profitable, they’re apparently expendable as far as the tech billionaires are concerned.
Tech Solutions
Many software pros and entrepreneurs are developing social media platforms to replace the current behemoths and overcome the sector’s worst abuses. Some proposed solutions offer minor tweaks to the functionality of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter; others take a more radical, comprehensive approach.
For one intriguing example, Timothy J. Horton of Toronto proposes to get at the roots of the problem by building in much higher levels of transparency and accountability from the get-go. His TSIS concept is based on seven fundamental principles:
- Identity Validation (Who are you? No hurling threats or lies anonymously)
- Reputation Communities (What sources do we trust?)
- Optimal Information (Personalized for each user)
- Proxy Delegation (Whom do we trust to sometimes speak for us?)
- Activism Support (Let’s solve the world’s problems collectively)
- Democratic Accountability (What are our leaders really up to?)
- Wealth Registries (Let’s reduce the corrupting power of dark money)
These principles seem essential to a saner public discourse — and to a functioning democracy more generally. They’re also a tall order to implement at scale. I don’t mean technically — good tools and algorithms exist, and Horton is an experienced software architect who has largely mapped and prototyped this all out. Rather, it’s hard to see how the “usual suspects” in corporate and venture finance would back such a platform that negates some of the most corrupting but profitable features of today’s giant social media platforms. Perhaps a citizen-led GoFundMe campaign can pull off a miracle here….
But even if all the problems of the InstaFaceTwitterTik world can’t be solved in one revolutionary fell swoop, there may be evolutionary changes that break the current oligopoly, enable safer functionalities and return more control to individuals.
For example, UX design specialist Alex O'Neal suggests that it’s already possible to get the benefits of social media apps with less of the downside, that we can move away from social network apps to personal curation and direct sharing of our experiences and content.
Many folks are hopeful about Web3, which holds some promise of decentralization and greater empowerment of content creators and citizens. Blockchain and related technologies can, in theory, give each of us greater control of our private data. Others are skeptical.
But switching is hard, as many of us have learned. The tech behemoths have significant market advantage and institutional momentum and power. Like the Borg, they acquire and assimilate smaller competitors. They’re moving ahead on that Spivack chart, adding new technologies and modalities onto their existing platforms and their corrupting business models, as the Zuckerberg Metaverse campaign (and its timing, right after recent whistleblower revelations) so aptly demonstrates.
What Can We Do As Individuals?
I tried to quit Facebook; that lasted for about a year. The platform does make it all too temptingly easy to see and comment on the family and vacation photos of far-away loved ones, and to connect with former classmates around reunion time. To boycott it is to feel “left out” — especially during this pandemic era when it is not so easy to hop on a plane to San Francisco or Jakarta for real visits.
So what can we do as citizens, as parents, while we wait for better, safer and more principled technologies to come along?
First, we can limit our (and our children’s) screen time. Seek out real relationships and real experiences with real people. Go for a walk. Rediscover trees. It’s better for your own physical and mental health, better for your family, and better for democracy. (Studies suggest that those who rant on Facebook Twitter and the other platforms are usually not representative of most average Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, atheists/agnostics or people of faith). Conservative commentator April Lawson demonstrates that there are constructive real-world ways to ramp down toxic polarization.
Second, we can try to innoculate ourselves and our communities against disinformation and incitement. Imagine if more of us received a decent liberal arts education that included strong curriculum in civics, history and the sciences, and in the principles of logical and statistical reasoning. Studies show that conspiracy theorists tend to lack critical thinking skills (no surprise), but also that such skills can be taught successfully even to 12- and 13-year-olds.
We can each take up a good spiritual practice. While dogmatic, divisive religion is too often part of the problem, a practice of meditation, or of Stoic or Buddhist philosophy can tame our addiction to the dopamine hits we get from online ego-surfing and rage.
Imagine a society of mature, mindful, well-informed grownups who don’t demand constant entertainment; of young women and girls who are allowed to feel good about themselves even without a thousand “Likes” on their instagram bikini photo. Imagine a society that doesn’t mistake insult-comics and grifters for leaders.
So What Does the Future Hold?
Three key drivers will continue to push us forward on this journey: The individual desire to transcend distance and boundaries; the technologies of connection, immersion and simulation; and the commercial drive for new and profitable product opportunities.
The metaverse is almost here: ubiquitous, real-time, high-resolution virtual and augmented reality. Haptic interfaces that let you feel and control real and virtual objects at a distance. Direct neural interfaces that bypass the eyes, ears and hands entirely are coming, as A. S. Deller informs us. Instantaneous translation across most human languages; AI mediators and assistants that manage your affairs. The Internet of Things (IoT) — every appliance in your home “talking” to you and operating under your (or a hacker’s) direct mental control.
Will these technologies free or enslave us — or a bit of both?
It is worth noting that every major advance in communications technology brought out critics and alarmists, and each was exploited by demagogues and criminals. In the mid 19th Century, newspaper editors lamented the disinformation potential of the trans-Atlantic telegraph: “The telegraph is not a very clear narrator of facts”, they said, and decent people would “mourn for the good old times when mails came by steamer twice a month”. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels boasted that “It would not have been possible for us to take power or use it in the ways we have without the radio.”
Some argue that the problem isn’t really with the technology, but with us:
"But it turns out there’s nothing intrinsically good about connection, especially online. On the internet, exposure to people unlike us often makes us hate them, and that hatred increasingly structures our politics. The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself. — Michelle Goldberg
Now that we have seen the sometimes ugly truth about each other’s (and our own!) neuroses, character flaws, addictive habits and cognitive biases, will we continue reaching out, trying to connect? I believe we will, because that drive to connect, to communicate, coordinate and learn from each other is a big part of what made Homo sapiens the dominant species on our planet. I just hope we can connect in better, smarter, safer ways. Maybe we can outgrow our species’ painful, awkward technolocal adolescence and mature into a truly intelligent civilization. It’s ultimately up to us, as citizens, consumers, and content creators.
