Quick Sketch: Social Media Hearings

 I don't really know the context, I should put up front. The news is largely background noise to me, though I'm still in the habit of checking The Age headlines, I think I'm addicted to feeling offended by it's vacuity.

But I saw this thing where they had tech billionaire social media owners called up to Washington, I guess for senate hearings or some shit. Who cares. Children are dying. Zucktang, Musk and whoever else were called on to do better to protect their users.

Relatives and loved ones of victims were given the opportunity to show photos of people who lost their lives as a result of being targeted on social media. Now, I don't know, I plead ignorance as to the scope of this hearing or inquiry or whatever. It at the very least in the news clip I saw covered victims of sexual exploitation via social media that then resulted in suicide. 

Now I could look up the news story and read some detailed coverage and I would point out so can you. What I increasingly can't do, is finish a point. The story is a catalyst, a jumping off point for me to sketch out some thoughts.

Because obviously I can imagine the scope being much broader - if it is people who are dead that would otherwise be alive if say, they were young in the 90s rather than the 2020s we could expand include people who were bullied in DMs, tracked down by violent former partners, piled on for voicing the "wrong" opinion etc. 

I'm no fan of tech nerd billionaires. Frankly I think they are religious icons to a larger population of losers than K-Pop idols, probably because they produce things that are ostensibly/theoretically useful and/or addictive rather than 50 different limited edition cover physical albums to be bought by some Korean aunty in a loot-box style setup until she has them all because it's the only way she can escape the grim reality of whatever social commentary "Parasite" and "The Squid Game" were making.

It struck me as a superfine example of how not to listen. How not to empathise cognitively.

The CEO/Majority Shareholders I think by the headline apologized that they hadn't done enough to protect users, you know and there's a valid but boring story there of that apology will only be meaningful if they follow up.

Zuckerberg as a person seems to bolster theories of interdimensional lizard people, and I've heard him described by former investors as a sociopath, which is not a clinical diagnosis. Let me say, he can do all the BJJ he wants, he does not strike me as someone with his thumb on the fucking pulse. I haven't seen the social network, but I think he was a right place, right time kind of one good idea kind of guy who invented a natural monopoly and probably is not worth listening to otherwise.

And Musk, well he may be a pure entrepreneur in the sense that he seems to have good ideas and fucking stupid ideas in roughly equal proportion and is likely propped up by morons who cannot tell the difference between the two. I see ugly arse Teslas driving around my neighbourhood, and Musk strikes me as neither a Gates or a Jobs, as in less than, less than the average of those two. I don't by Rian Johnson's Glass Onion hypothesis, but the half of Elon Musk's ideas I'm sceptical of, is the half I'd describe as good ideas. 

And Tik Tok, well nobody ever succeeded me in selling the platform formally known as Twitter, selling it to me conceptually. There has not been a day since it "blew up" into an actually pretty unpopular social media platform used by hardly anyone at its peak, and used by hardly any of its users within itself Twitter has been more overrepresented in the media because journalists fucking depend upon it, than white women are overrepresented in Mattel products and white babies are overrepresented on Nestle products. Tik Tok appeared to take the promised vapidity of Twitter's character limit and flip that into dance videos. Of course I've never been interested in TikTok because I am not a pedophile. Unlike twitter however, Tik Tok is popular, and I suspect may even be profitable, not just for influencers but like Tik Tok's shareholders and the CCP. 

My only possible interest is if TikTok US operations manager or whatever the title is, apologised for victims among it's userbase that had been targeted by the CCP for expressing dissident thoughts that threatened social harmony and morality and promoted western decadence.

So yeah, not news, social media companies are run by garbage people. That's not who I'm interested in in terms of failing to listen and failure to employ cognitive empathy.

People should always be able to complain, but what came to mind was old youtube ads for Masterclass with Edward Snowden who said something like:

You can't make a system that is secure against bad guys and insecure for good guys. A system is either secure or insecure, not both.

Something like that. This probably ultimately applies to a social media platform. Likely someone in some theoretical maths department could write a proof if they haven't already that you can't make a platform that adults can use, that minors can't use. You can't make a platform that people can use, that pedophiles can't use.

Youth (16-25yos) can't do anything, that 26-70yo's wont take an interest in and attempt to adopt to ward off their fear of death, and worse, irrelevance. The news is always going to be informing middle aged LOSERS what the kids are doing these days - and rarely to shock them.

So whatever happened in these hearings, the more I chew on it, the more I think the CEOs apologizing and vowing to do better is a bad result. This is more a 2nd Amendment, California environmental regulation type situation. 

I'm going to do it. I'm going to bring up the NBA. I have been persuaded to the camp, that the current NBA commissioner Adam Silver is running the NBA into the ground and transforming it into a joke. He probably needs to front an enquiry that isn't Kevin Garnett and apologise and promise to do better as Kobe Bryant's (RIP and Giana "Mambasita" possibly the lost future viability of the WNBA) widow demanding an apology for the recent spate of 70+ point performances thanks to his removal of defense in the NBA. Then graphic photos of bronze medals could be displayed that Adam Silver was forced to look at, because US players are no longer competitive internationally, whereas other nations still teach basketball fundamentals to their children.

Anyway, the NBA is first and foremost entertainment, it generates revenue by entertaining people, it also creates celebrities who can leverage their proximity to entertainment to make money endorsing crap. If ratings decline, then the NBA has a problem. The current commissioner though seems to be taking the dumb approach of looking at things that generated high ratings, and then immitating them.

Like he looks at Michael Jordan winning six championships, and is like "people found that exciting, so we should just pick a player and hand them six championships, and people will be excited again." and looking at Kobe's 81 point performance that generated a lot of buzz and thinking "that was pretty exciting, what if we change the rules so defending and even contesting shots are disallowed and then scores will go up, and everyone will be excited if people are scoring 80 points a night, and maybe someone will score the most points ever! Won't that be exciting, maybe I should change the rules so there's only one team per game and they just try to score as many points in 40 minutes as possible? Like those arcade games with the paper tickets. I'm sure they are more popular than THE NBA!!!"

Now, if something is stupid and it works, I believe that. Silver's stupid ideas are not working, people who were fans are actively losing interest in the game. It's even hard to like or care about players worth liking and caring about when they are basically allowed to score uncontested lay ups all game. It's a sad state of affairs. 

Is basketball like soccer and cycling? Or is it like WWE? That's a genuine question. When you make wrestling fake, it turns into theatre, perhaps the most popular and profitable theatre in the world. Maybe it is beginning to lose out to MMA UFC I don't know and frankly don't care. That stuff is nerd shit. 

If you applied the NBA mentality to soccer, it would translate into 'Gee people get excited in the World Cup when a team kicks a goal, emotions sky rocket! If we got rid of the offside rule and the goalies, and made the net bigger, soccer would become EVEN MORE EXCITING!' to which I think most of Europe and all of North, Central and South America would be burned to the ground.

Then cycling, cycling did face a dilemma - everyone was fucking juicing. Whoever organizes cycling probably hesitated for years knowing if they really cracked down on doping, then performances would suffer, records held by undetected dopers would stand, maybe forever a la suspected juicer and track legend Flo Jo's 100m Womens Sprint record.

My impression is, international cycling pushed that button and cleaned up the sport. The Tour De France takes longer, cyclists are slower, but there's less doping. It's a safer, slower sport for pro cyclists, and I don't know if its popularity dipped or what, I suspect at the very least it is still viable.

So what does all that have to do with Social Media CEOs apologizing and promising to do better? Well they are running private companies and unlike Adam Silver, they have algorithms telling them whether shit works or not and they just generally do what works to drive engagement.

They have algorithms saying if you keep people fucking angry all the time, they stay engaged. 

So if they do something of the many anythings they can do to protect users, it'll probably cost them revenue. I have it from Yanis Varafoukis that when that video leaked of an Asian man being dragged off an oversold flight, for all the bad press it had no impact on the company share price. A few weeks or months later, the company announced payrises for its workforce and that caused a sharp drop in share price. Again I can fact check this, or you could, I can't fact check it and finish this post and I'm almost done.

The government needs to provide the regulatory environment a la the NBA and the players a la the social media companies' play will conform to the rules of the game. The government should apologize for being reluctant and slow to regulate social media. 

I gauruntee we will never hear Smith and Wesson and whatever other gun manufacturers dragged before some Washington committee (I mean of course they are all the time) but shown pictures of victims of their products, and have those gun manufacturers apologise and promise to do better and go back and manufacture guns that only kill violent criminals and keep king Chucky III out of their customers faces.

The government could preserve free speech and ban emojis in profile names so people can't display what causes they are affiliated forcing people to figure out whether they actually like or hate somebody based on the content of their character. They could regulate that algorithms deprioritize politicized content and they could force social media to work with third party fact checkers to give the "factual" "semi-factual" "bullshit" traffic light highlighting, and anything bullshit requires an extra click to be viewed much like mature content on art-station and deviant art.

And this context, which I don't and likely never will have all of, just strikes me as a singular example of the shortcomings of our species to listen and take the perspective of their adversaries. Just the simple act of "what would I do, were I in your shoes? Because there's a chance that if I were in your shoes I would have done what you did." allowing you to calm the fuck down and perhaps collaborate. Not the kind of collaboration that gets you killed in North Korea, but the kind of collaboration that solves problems good. 

Of course, just as valid complaints do not by necessity come paired with valid solutions, I stand by the principle that you can always complain. But like, listening to the other side is good, perspective taking is good. Maybe we might just find a valid solution.