Add my "what went wrong" take to the pile

[genxlib]

138. This is 1000% the message I have been spouting for years.

Among all of the short term and long term political ramifications, it is this total disconnect from a shared reality that has me pessimistic on the future.

I just don’t think that the human capability for independent thought is dealing well with technology advancements.

In the transition from broadcast to cable to internet, the sources of information that people utilize have been increasingly self selected.

In the continued evolution of social media, that self-selection became curated content. At first it was by algorithms that care more about screentime than reality. They quickly learned that outrage generated more clicks than nuanced information. It is like an addiction and they will sell you stronger and stronger drugs to keep you coming back. I don’t even think it was on purpose at first. It is just that the programming was tasked to generate engagement and outrage is what worked more often than not.

Inevitably this led to sponsored micro-targeting of the feeds. With the amount that is known about people, feeds can be customized to reach us individually. We are at the point where every single person in America has a customized feed of information.

And it will only get worse with the advent of AI. We can now generate images and video to actually provide “evidence” even for things that aren’t true. We are entirely unprepared for that. Being convinced that a fake image is true isn’t even the worst outcome. It is the general idea that no image can be trusted that will further degrade the ability to prove anything to anyone.

For all of those saying, "no, it was the misogyny, or the racism, or the ignorance, or the nationalism, or the christianity, or the isolationism...". That is just the point. It can be all of those things with the exact perfect message beamed straight into the consciousness of each person depending on their particular mindset. And it can be customized to target fear, anxiety, anger, depending on what works best at the individual level. It doesn't matter if it's true, or nuanced or fair. It is effective and it's killing us.

And just to be clear, I include us in all of that. We are all a product of our individualized data stream. I would argue we are better than others but I think the last few weeks have shown that we also experience a significant level of disconnect.

We no longer live in a world where we share any common sense of reality. It makes me pessimistic for the future even beyond politics. I don't see how we tackle any future challenges in this environment.