Is Social Media Training Us to Please a Machine?

A remarkably literary critique of the internet appeared recently in Damage magazine — a project of the nonprofit Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry funded by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation. "There are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon..." argues writer Sam Kriss.

We tend to think that the internet is a communications network that we use to speak to one another, but we are not doing anything of the sort. Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same way. The same vocabulary is used by the younger generation on social media. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you meet them in the sunlit world, they will say valid or based. Everything you say online is subject to a system of rewards. Every platform has metrics that you can use to quantify how well-received your thoughts are. The game is hard to resist for most people, they end up trying to say things that the machine will like. This stuff is much more destructive than online censorship. There is a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions, so you have no free speech. It is not a policy that could ever be changed, but a function of the internet itself. This might be the reason that so much writing that comes out of the internet is so dull, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels. The internet isn't a communications system. The experience of being among people is what it is like instead of delivering messages between people. There are things that a simulation won't capture. The experience of looking directly into the face of another person is what distinguishes ethical responsibility from killing. There are only images of faces and selfies. There is a moving image in a chat. There is always something happening. The machine is talking to itself, not a person. As more and more of your social life takes place online, you are training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them. Many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be based in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. Push a button and they will disappear forever.

The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all. "For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."

Kriss argues that the internet is a break from what we had before, and that it is as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign.