An unpersuasive guide for how to resist temptation online
Separating the internet from behavioral science.
As an elder millennial, a formative moral experience at college in the 2000s was when I decided social psychology was basically evil.
The evil was less about the science of social psychology itself (the Milgram electric-shock / Stanford prison experiments didn’t help!) than what the results suggested: that people are unthinking meat sacks who can be prodded, primed, anchored and nudged into doing what the experimenter wants. The findings were worse than believable, they were practical. Every successful social psych experiment was a instruction manual for how to reduce someone else’s free will. Knowledge = power [derogatory].
Amid all this, reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” landed on my conscience with biblical weight. Consider the notion that evil could be banal; that you could create evil in the world through unthinkingness; that your unthinkingness creates conditions for holocaust; that for unthinkingness, Arendt thinks you should hang. You must think or else people could die. You must think, or a brilliant writer’s stylish book about your lethal emptiness will live on the curricula forever.
It all hits pretty hard when you’re a 20-year-old English major, confused but basically in love with yourself, wanting to be a good person and also a good writer like Arendt, while struggling against the evidence that you’re just a stimuli-driven meat sack who would totally get irradiated by the Hitler particles if tested under laboratory conditions. Message received. If I wanted to believe humans have free will, I had to actually try to use it.
Of course, two decades further into adulthood today, now closer in age to Hannah Arendt when she wrote “Eichmann in Jerusalem” than to myself when I first read it, the benefit of experience has been learning when human beings are nudgeable but not shoveable, seducible yet somehow maddeningly resistant to persuasion. The science suggests a little bit of mind-control is real. Yet reality keeps manufacturing insane outcomes no one could possibly be in charge of (DONALD JOHN TRUMP IS PRESIDENT AGAIN).
The worst meatsackification of human free will has predictably happened online, the only laboratory environment where conditions can be completely controlled, tested, surveilled and reproduced at practically zero cost. Logging on anywhere these days is like punching in for another unpaid shift at the nudge factory. (No, your AI doesn’t actually think you have great ideas, it’s just saying that so you keep buying tokens from Sam Altman who really really really needs the revenue.) The social scientist, like the kind employed by Big Tech companies, knows that humans are controlled very quickly; it’s disobedience that takes a bit longer. Resistance requires friction, an inconvenient force that will shape and enforce new norms. The users and workers of the internet need a union.
It’s less the immediate conditions of life online than the underlying premises of our whole predicament that need renegotiating. Monopolies can be broken up and ill-gotten wealth taxed back from the extractors, but John Maynard Keynes was probably right when he said that it’ll be the underlying ideas that could be the hardest to untrench. While revisiting Keynes’ passage from “The General Theory of Employment” to find his famous quip about “practical men” unwittingly being “the slaves of some defunct economist,” it was Keynes’ less-quoted part lower down, about the young getting stuck in their ways, that now catches my attention (bolding mine):
…The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
Now that millennials are reaching middle age and finally finally rising toward our time of political hegemony, I wonder which dogmas we’ll drag into power with us and refuse to update until we’re dead. The crisis is here, but despite every data point screaming that I need to be saying all this stuff on a short-form video somewhere (especially to reach people younger than me), I know I’ll be stuck with the literary mode as the “serious,” “important” form of expression. I guess it’s my form of disobedience. To cling to the primacy of the word is to reject completely the modern methodology of persuasion. To work in paragraphs is to stand on a older tradition from when giants strode the earth, like Arendt and Keynes and the rest. Writing like this, to no one in particular, isn’t science but attempted necromancy. Just some guy trying to raise the dead.
I've spent a lot of time questioning the sort of "reach" one can even achieve with short-form video anyway, when everything seen there is up to the algorithm—or "the nudge factory," as you put it. It either annoints or stifles, theoretically based on engagement, but certainly with its own unseen thumbs on the scales as well.
Really interesting angle here. As a younger millennial I was struck by the fact that I have passed my point of being influenced by new theories and the fact that our cohort is finally rising into power. What will we do with it? What things will do or say or push that will make younger generations say, "are you actually serious right now?" I also related with the fact that we *know* we should be doing short-form video, but writing in paragraphs is just how our brains are wired. Sigh!