Are We the Baddies?

Summary

I signed up for Hinge. Holy shit with the boosts. How does someone who works on this wake up every morning and feel okay about themselves? Similarly with the tip screens, Uber algorithm, all the zero sum bullshit using all the tricks of psychology to extract a little bit more from every interaction in society. Nudge. Nudge. NUDGE. Want to partake in normal society like buying a coffee, going on a date, getting a ride, paying a friend. Oh, there’s a middle man now. An evil ominous middleman using state of the art AI algorithms to extract just a little bit more from you. But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere? Ahhh, but they see that coming long before you do. They have dashboards. Quick Jeeves, tune the AI to make people feel less manipulated. Give them a little bit more for now, we have to think about maximizing lifetime customer value here. Oh the AI already did this on its own? Jeeves you’ve been replaced! People perpetually on the edge. You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen’s race we can’t afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH! Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take? A complete self cannibalization to the point you can’t eat your own mouth? It sure as hell isn’t going to be people opting out, that’s a collective action problem you can’t solve. Democracy, haha, you think the algorithms will let you vote to kill them? Your vote is as decoupled from action as the amount Uber pays the driver is decoupled from the fare that you pay. There’s no reform here, there’s only revolution. Will it simply be a huge financial collapse? Or do we need World War 3? And even World War 3 is on a spectrum. Will mass starvation fix this? Or will the attitude of thinking it’s ok...