Episode 4: Feeling the Effects of Digital Technology with Lil Internet

Why Understanding Digital Tech Isn't Enough; We Need to Feel Its Effects The way digital environments, digital networks, social media has been changing us as humans, us, our cognition, all these strange and order effects that have change society in profound ways. This stuff has been theorized for like over a decade. I mean, you can kind of trace it back all the way to the 60s or cybernetics to find a really clear understanding of what these systems are doing to us. And for some reason, at least on the scale of the public, often the scale of the state, people hear these things. They they hear that social media or algorithmic machine learning driven algorithmic recommendation engines are kind of operating in these feedback loops that are changing almost the nature of language itself, changing the way our cognition operates on an almost non conscious level. Of course, there's a ton of discussion about how social media like literally rewires the brain of young people in a different way. And we hear all these things, we've known these things and for some reason it's like they don't click. They don't, they aren't like integrated into our day-to-day understanding or experiences of engaging with these technologies. And I think ultimately what we what needs to happen is people actually somehow need to feel the gravity of that change, feel the weight of it, feel maybe a bit scared of it, maybe even generate a bit of healthy paranoia or recognition of it as something alien. The Disconnect: Why Theory Fails to Translate to Public Awareness It needs to be an embodied feeling of, of what these technologies are doing to us. And for some reason that has proven very difficult. Perhaps it's because using these technologies as a ultimately A disembodied experience, it's a bit dissociative. It's like uses a single sense. You know, I think we need to figure out ways. I think we as people who speak critically about these media, as academics or philosophers, everyone has theorized this really, really well. And for some reason the ability to translate it to the public, to the state has failed. And I think it's because of this disconnect between understanding it in an embodied sense, understanding it in a guts, since like your intuition knows what this is. That has not been achieved. What me and my partner Carly Busta with new models have always tried to do is exist a bit in between of the space of the more the realm of philosophy and academia and media theorists and a more broader public audience. And it's a constant game of figuring out new language, new ways of discussing this technology so that it finally clicks or so that people can finally feel it. But I think it's something that is necessary and there's probably many, many ways of doing it, probably different ways of doing it for different people that would work better. But I always think back to like the beginning of religious practices as that it's something about the symbolic world. Always since the beginning of since cave paintings or whenever humans started using symbols, it's always been treated as something extremely powerful and something that has the ability to change us and change behaviour, even change reality. I mean, magic has always been a a system of like agentic symbols, symbols that act on and change the world. And so even religion itself has been a process of formalizing, kind of putting rails on our engagement with the symbolic world. And in some sense, we've kind of blown open the symbolic world to the point that we spend most of our time in a realm of, of, of pure symbol. And yet we haven't come up with any framework for engaging with the symbolic in a way that's beneficial for us as living physical beings. So maybe they'll be an explosion of new religions maybe, or spiritual practices. But I think to get to that point, public finally has to understand and really feel that there is something alien within these systems we're engaging with all the time. And that we cannot just treat it as a another form of media as we've understood it, as we've understood media for the last however many years. How Digital Environments Actively Shape Our Cognition and Behavior Our model of what these networked media technologies are has kind of, I think decayed in the past 20 years actually compared to what it was say in the 90s when we still called it cyberspace, which acknowledged its cybernetic nature, that it is a feedback loop. Like you're not just surfing the web, you're not, you're not in total control, just gliding across an environment or a, a smooth frictionless surface as a user, right? Or is online service just serves you information, right? It's changes you while you interact with it. And you know, we, we talk about social media platforms and going on the Internet. And I think this spatial element like cyberspace or even calling them environments is a much better basic word to, to understand or discuss these things. Because I mean, if you just think from an evolutionary perspective, we evolve to we evolve in a way that is optimized for our environments. And these digital spaces are environments, especially when we're spending like most of our day in them. Now, I find it interesting that if you look at like a Rand report, right, or internal documents or research on the state level, they always speak of a, of a country's information environment. They use that word understanding that that environment is inevitably going to shape and change behavior. You can understand it as we're evolving in a way to optimize ourselves for these digital environments rather than material reality. This gets really complex and it's difficult to articulate. The Profound Impact of Digital Environments on Our Memory And I think that's part of the problem. There's been this disconnect between the theorization of these platforms and the public's understanding of them. But I think the most immediate example and one that I think everyone already feels, even if they're not quite aware of it, is the way it's changing our memory. Any memory that has a lot of multi sensory intensity of touch and smell and taste and sight and sound, you're going, it's going to create a strong memory, you're going to remember it. And then that's episodic memory or experiential memory. And then there's semantic memory, which is like remembering facts or remembering information you don't remember studying for a test. All of that information you memorized in the same way as you remember, like losing your virginity or something. It's a very different kind of memory. And we're spending most of our time in environments that are just like pure semantic memory. It's just visual. It creates these like memories that aren't situated in time. They, they, it's hard to remember which, which memory came when. I mean, I used the example of like, you know, if you, if you think about, try to remember what you did last week, you're going to think about going out one night or having lunch with a friend or going for a hike or something. Even though you spent most of your time online, Like all of that stuff is not like a real memory. What you did did there and all of the stuff you did online is like not memory in any kind of experiential way or in any way that fills what it kind of means to like live a life. And I think about, you know, I think about near death experiences or people saying, you know, my life flashed before my eyes, right? And all of this, this swirl of all of the swirl of memories of things that happened to you, things you did in your childhood or all the way up to that point, or, you know, sometimes you'll remember something that happened 20 years ago that you hadn't thought of. Like that memory is still in there. But you know, if someone today could die, their life could flash before their eyes and it would be like crypto charts. Like that's really, really crazy. And so I think this kind of loss of memory in the way that memory matters is kind of the easiest way to see how this digital environment is really changing us on a profound level. Because everyone knows being online is just a like a blur, like outside of time, outside of experience. And it, it's just not a memory like a memory of a wonderful day in the summer at the beach. AI's Role in Shaping Identity and Cognitive Re-speciation The cybernetic nature of these technologies is intensified ultimately by AI and machine learning. I mean, it ultimately makes these systems have their own agency and also know, know us, you know, and to some degree better than we know themselves. So they are going to the feedback loop between US and artificial intelligence, I think is going to give rise to something that's kind of beyond the self or beyond the individual. And at the same time, we've seen over the well since the really beginning of public accessibility to the Internet, it being used as a place to experiment with one's identity, with one's sense of self, with who one is. And of course, that gets into this state where identity becomes much more fluid. And this concept of the self can dissolve into collective swarms of particular behavior or identity or collective entity in the way like a swarm of bees or ants does. I'm originally American, and I moved to Berlin 10 years ago. But in that time, I've seen the United States as this nation kind of on the edge of these complex abstract systems and simulation. I think right now we're seeing the results of kind of designing a society or, or allowing society to be 1, where the simulation is the primary sphere of, of human activity. And it's not, it's not good really. What's really strange about this time is that we, I mean, even the people in the White House, the president and the advisors around him are people whose ideologies and, and frameworks were very much formed in these digital simulated spaces. And at the same time, you have a lot of people who are still really live primarily in material reality. If you ever look at like, I don't know, a grandparents or a particular cousin's Facebook page and it's like pictures of dogs and like a post to donate to the local animal shelter and like a picture of a picnic, you're like, oh, those people are living in like a very, very different, they have a very, very different relationship to the digital realm than I do or many other people do. And in a way, the scariest thing as this intensifies with machine learning is that you, you have kind of like a cognitive re speciation of humanity, where at the most fundamental levels you're going to have people in society who think in this way intensely shaped by simulated environments. And then you'll have other people's who have basically 20th century brains and what kind of NTH order effects that ends up manifesting, no one can tell. The Urgent Need for Regulation in Digital Environments But I think what we're seeing with the extreme dysfunction in the United States right now and just the extreme dysfunction started with embracing the free market in this Milton Friedman framework of, of, of tying everything to a single metric. Europe didn't do that. And Europe still has really wonderful infrastructure and a social safety net and, and feels so much more functional than the United States does, speaking as an American. And so I think really we need to put railings on these digital environments and and figure out a more formal way to relate to them. Otherwise, they're these kind of feedback loops that spin off into ultimately disaster, sometimes on a a very, very profound scale as it as is the case with the United States. If you look at what, how China has engaged with social media, there's a built in like technologically enforced time limit on how much any anyone under 18 can use these platforms. Like if you're under 14, it's like 40 minutes a day and it logs you out. The recommendation algorithms on social media for anyone under 18 in China have to be steered towards motivating or educational content. Anyone under 18 can only play video games 3 hours a week, one hour each on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I mean, this sounds like really, really extreme to us, but it also reflects that China takes extremely seriously how much, how profoundly these technologies change us as people. And I think we need to design these environments fully acknowledging the fact that it doesn't matter if we think consciously think we're we kind of are resilient to them affecting us. They're absolutely changing us in ways that are so subtle that we might not even notice them. But you know, look at the 2nd order, 3rd order, 4th order, NTH order effects of that and they always end up being extremely profound. And by the time they kind of reach the, the scale of society itself, it, it feels like it's too late. I think we're still early enough in the adoption of AI that we just might be able to develop a model and to develop language that allows really the public to better understand what is going on when they use these technologies. And I don't think we achieve that with social media.