“Film noir is the conjunction of violence and irony, and we Americans don’t do irony very well. We are a straightforward and self-righteous people, so we are rather good at viciousness and humor but lacking in irony.”
David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business
FIRST, DETERMINE IF YOUR CHILD HAS A SCREEN: Here’s how to tell if your child has a screen addiction
Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.
Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.
1. Moore’s Law plus the internet makes smart people smarter, and stupid people less smart.
2. Manipulable people can be reached with a greater flood of information, so over time as data on them accumulate, they become more manipulable.
3. It is often easier to manipulate smart people than stupid people, because the latter may be oblivious to a greater set of cues and clues.
4. Social media bring smarter people together with the less smart more than used to be the case, Twitter more so than Facebook. Members of each group are appalled by what they experience. The smarter people see the lesser smarts of many others. The less smart people — who often are not entirely so stupid after all — can see how manipulated the smarter people are. They also see that the smarter people look down on them and attack their motives and intellects. Both groups go away thinking less of each other.
4b. The smarter people, in reacting this way, in fact are being manipulated by the (stupider) powers that be.
5. “There is a performative dimension that renders both sides more rigid and dishonest.” From a correspondent.
6. Consider a second distinction, namely between people who are too sensitive to social information, and people who are relatively insensitive to social information. A quick test of this one is to ask how often a person’s tweets (and thoughts) refer to the motivations, intentions, or status hierarchies held by others. Get the picture? (Here is an A+ example.)
7. People who are overly sensitive to social information will be driven to distraction by Twitter. They will find the world to be intolerably bad. The status distinctions they value will be violated so, so many times, and in a manner which becomes common knowledge. And they will perceive what are at times the questionable motives held by others. Twitter is like negative catnip for them. In fact, they will find it more and more necessary to focus on negative social information, thereby exacerbating their own tendencies toward oversensitivity.
8. People who are not so sensitive to social information will pursue social media with greater equanimity, and they may find those media productivity-enhancing. Nevertheless they will become rather visibly introduced to a relatively new category of people for them — those who are overly sensitive to social information. This group will become so transparent, so in their face, and also somewhat annoying. Even thoseextremely insensitive to social information will not be able to help perceiving this alternate approach, and also the sometimes bad motivations that lie behind it. The overly sensitive ones in turn will notice that another group is under-sensitive to the social considerations they value. These two groups will think less and less of each other. The insensitive will have been made sensitive. It’s like playing “overrated vs. underrated” almost 24/7 on issues you really care about, and which affect your own personal status.
9. The philosophy of Stoicism will return to Silicon Valley. It will gain adherents but fail, because the rest of the system is stacked against it.
10. The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry. The socially insensitive will either jump ship into the camp of the socially sensitive, or they will cultivate new methods of detachment, with or without Stoicism. Straussianism will compete with Stoicism.
11. Parts of social media will peel off into smaller, more private groups. At the end of the day, many will wonder which economies of scale and scope have been lost. And gained. Others will be too manipulated to wonder such things.
12. The “finance guy” in me thinks: how can I use all this for intellectual arbitrage? Which camp does that put me in?
13. What bounds this process?