Comment by Lambdanaut
3 hours ago
The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
It's time to let people choose their own algorithm and force upon the platforms a marketplace for algorithms.
Pointless. 95% would stick to the default
> process designed to optimize for attracting our attention
namely: "social" media
this stuff always reminds me of There is no antimemetis division [0]
From Case Hate Red:
> With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around.
[0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub