This site is meant to be a repository of media (images, video, and audio). So without launching into a philosophical essay, we will define this tag as a catchall for what we call:
- SCIN (Socialmedia/Cellphone Induced Narcissism)
- Code-sick
- Algorithmic Psychosis
These phrases are terms we invented to describe a pattern we have been observing and struggling to describe for years. We are sure you have seen it also. Put simply:
“social media and cellphones are making the world sick”
However it isn’t the “social-ness” of the “media” itself that is making people sick. Nor is it the cellphones themselves that are making people sick. It is the nexus of these (and other) technologies converging on one another.
For many years there was a healthy “idea meritocracy” and “town square” with open and spirted debates happening throughout the internet. Social-media thrived organically for many years (The Well, USENET, ListServ, Geocities, Friendster, even Twitter and early Facebook, et al) until one major thing changed, machine learning and computing power gave birth to computationally inexpensive “algorithmic content curation”. In other words: it became much cheaper to have computers “understand” and classify human-generated content (like text, speech, and sentiment) than ever before, your average home PC can do it.
Driven by the revenue generated by highly-specific targeted tracking and advertising, the same targeting when applied to content curation and combined with highly specific user profile/behavior gave birth to a completly new era. A new monster. The ability to influence the thoughts and actions of specific groups of people en masse by curating what they see. This was a whole new unmanned and programmatic way to manufacture consent. Unlike with legacy-media (newspapers, television, etc) the intimacy of cellphones (using them while defecating, just before sleep, just after waking, in quiet moments) made the propaganda reach people at a almost subliminal level. The cognitive “nudges” could be made at all hours of the day not just when someone was indulging in a deliberate act like opening a newspaper or sitting down in front of the television. During these intimate moments people are dissociated, receptive, and more likely to suspend disbelief. Net-net, “suggestion” became easier because of the frequency of touch-points.
Consqeuently, armies of “code sick” people suffering from algorithm-induced psychosis are powering political parties across the globe. They have even raized cities, rioted, looted and burned, joined armed conflicts, made life-critical medical decisions, voted, all because of stuff they saw on the glowing retangle they keep in their pocket. Combined with the social reinforcement of other mutually code-sick people that they were unwittingly “match"ed with by yet again more “sentiment analysis” algorithms, the deception becomes dried and cured into a “solid” belief in the mind.
Many assume the above applies to “radicalized” people or “conspiracy theorists”. While this does happen frequently, we posit that the problem is more pervasive. We posit instead that the “average” person is now actually in a state of disollusion about world events, news, technology, economics. What is accepted as “reality” is actually a Borgesian layer-cake of “narratives” arranged atop one another specificlly to cover the holes in the layer beneath. To burrow down to “base reality” of truth is therefore not a straight line, but instead a circuitous path. If you’ve ever had the experience of disabusing a friend of a specific rumor or urban legend or fake story, you probably were required (as a prerequisite) had to unravel some other related stories first, to set the predicate and foundation for your unraveling of the main subject.
We posit that virtially all narratives are like this. Not “some”. Not “a plurality”. Not “quite a few”. Virtually all of them. The deceptions are not the exception, but in-fact the rule. Putin’s “political technologist” (aka strategist) Vladislav Sukov drawing from the surrealist science-fiction writers The Strugatsky Brothers, referred to this as “shapeshifting”. To hide the truth in plain sight by shifting and changing. A curtain of chaff and flares so that the public (and adversaries) cant tell what is real and what is fake. Inevitably a “fake” reality is constructed from the pieces “fake” information thrown at them during the bombardment. Truth is the diamond in the mine, not the dirt and rock in the mine. To believe the media is “mostly truthful” is to believe that diamond mines are “mostly diamonds” with just a little dirt.
This new era, this new monster has made it possible to wittingly and unwittingly scale-up deception with layers of narrative simply by algorithmically enforcing bias. This can all be done without a “man in the loop”, algorithms can handle most (if not) all of this. Conveniently, they can also be use to also “defend narrative” by algorithmically excluding any exculpatory evidence like counter-narrative stories and experts, while offering the platform owners “plausible deniability”: “We didnt know that story was censored, the sentiment analysis algorithms assumed people weren’t interested.” Without a balanced and healthy dialectic (or mix of both sides of an issues), then like magic tricks, the mind fills in the blanks…further solidifying the illusion and our attachment to it as truth.
The common perception of disinformation and misinformation is that like wildfires they can be started by arson, but most often are started by accident. What we propose is not that most fires are not infact accident but third party arsonists. No. We propose that things have evolved much further. We posit (to use the same metaphor) that the accident/arson incidents combined comprise a slim majority. We posit that the firemen and rangers took note, and are actually now responsible for most of the fires.
This new era, this new monster has changed geopolitics, pop culture, society, education, capital markets, consumerism, politics, and even sparked/justified wars and revolutions.
It has almost accidentally even given birth to completely new subcultures (think: TikTok, Instagram, OnlyFans, etc) and all the psychosis and normalized mental illness trends that resulted from their popularity.
Hopefully through the media on this site you can find many other examples of this trend other than what was listed here. We could prattle on with more exploration and examples. This screed started off with the intent to be a concise tag definition…so we’ll stop it here.
Hopefully at least now you see now why we chose the “AlgorithmicPsychosis” tags instead of something cute an innocuous like “SocialMedia”.