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Why is the world so chaotic?

In The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher tells the story of how social media has changed human behaviour in a very short time to create a chaotic and polarized world. Reading his book was an enlightening, troubling, and depressing experience.

Overall, the book is a narrative starting with the formation of social media apps and the psychology behind them and ending with the insurrection on the US capitol. On the psychology, Fisher’s opening chapter quotes Nir Eyal who says in Hooked that, “Our actions have been engineered”, comparing social media to slot machines and their use of Pavlovian conditioning. He notes that social media is far more accessible than slot machines.

He tells the story of how the “Awesome button” was often rejected by Mark Zuckerberg and eventually became the “Like” feature after a discussion of the psychology of self-esteem. The self-esteem meter came from the counters at the bottom of each post measuring the number of people reacting to content. To paraphrase B.J. Fogg, “people don’t want to be losers”.

These functions also led to the formation of groups and the increasing “us vs them” mentality of much of social media. I was struck by the books anecdote about the catering during the original Planet of the Apes films and Charlton Heston’s description of how chimpanzee and gorilla actors sat in separate groups during breaks as “instinctive segregation” and “quite spooky”. In subsequent chapters, Max Fisher goes on to describe the terrible polarization in Myanmar and subsequently Sri Lanka which was fueled by social media (and which he personally reported on).

His description of social media as “the fun house mirror” is spot on (and has been cited in a recent academic paper on polarization). Pizzagate showed the impact of social media on driving the rise in conspiracy theories and the impact that this has in the real world.

The research on the impact is very clear. People who delete, for example, Facebook accounts become happier, more satisfied with their lives, and less anxious. The only negative impact seen in such studies is that people become less knowledgeable about current news and events.

At the end of the book, Max Fisher discusses HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and parallels he sees with social media and above all the algorithms that drive the “success” of social meda. In 2001, HAL proves impossible to “tweak”, and he concludes, “The lesson was unambiguous: shut HAL off. Even it meant losing whatever benefits HAL brought. Even if it was difficult.”

This is a book I would urge everyone to read and I have given copies to a couple of friends. You may not agree with the conclusions or switch off your social media, but it will make you more aware of how social media is rewiring your mind.

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