GOOD MORNING! Here’s our weekly quote from Jason Miller’s Magick Monday Newsletter:
“Recently a Facebook friend noted “we don’t know how these algorithms work, but they are clearly not working well because I completely miss posts by my sister who I love, yet see all kind of other stuff I violently disagree with.”
“The general public may not know exactly how they work in detail, and as AI gets smarter than us and creates other AI, even the people in the companies won’t know. But we do know how they work generally: THEY SHOW US WHAT WE DISPLAY INTEREST IN. It’s that simple. It turns out to be mostly bad for us because it plays to our worst instincts. We need to start treating social media less as a news source and more as the entertaining health risk that it is. It is the bacon of your information diet. You cannot beat the Algorithm but you CAN use it.
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Show Me Where I Dump My Attention All!
“Use the Algorithm as a mirror. You didn’t see posts from your sister. I don’t see posts from my best friend. Why? It’s not the fault of the AI, it’s our fault. Your sister and my BFF aren’t posting stuff that pisses us off, so we don’t comment on it. We also maybe talk to them IRL more than social media, so we lose touch over that medium – the problem being that as that medium becomes the main medium for communication, we lose touch with the people we allegedly care about.
“Here is the brutal truth: Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TicTock andWhatever-the-hell-else reflects back what you spend time showing you care about. Not what you claim to care about, not what you think of yourself as caring about, not what you want to care about, but what you actually care about. It does not reflect who you want to be, it reflects WHO YOU ARE. And that’s the problem. Instead of exposing you to things that would make you more like who you WANT to be, it gives you all the tools to double down on who you are right now, the tools you need to race to the most extreme version of that.
“Take a look in the mirror and USE it. Let it scare you and scar you and startle you into awareness. Start deliberately seeking people out that you WANT to be exposed to, otherwise the troll that haunt your threads like a nagging poltergeist is what Facebook thinks you want more of – and it will give you more. Remember the blue dot effect I wrote about last month? Social Media throws that effect into overdrive!
“What does this have to do with Sorcery? Everything. The Algorhthm is a magic mirror that shows you pretty accurately what you are spending time and attention on. If you don’t like what it shows, that is valuable information to have. It shows what you need to change, and that is the very root of what we do. ”
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