Social Media?

It occurs to me that the rise of social media and platforms operating similar to social media are some sort of natural experiment with respect to culture building and interaction of the sort that would be impossible/unethical to conduct on non-social media platform communities. It's probably not a new thought, seeing that there are sociologists who have published papers studying various effects of such interactions as they intersect with existing real-world alliances/cultures.

But unlike the real-world alliance/culture, there is one major difference: there is an overt overlord over the social media platform that is more understandable than the covert overlord over the real world (i.e. God). God's will is unknowable a priori; even prophets generally can only get the rough vibe of what is to come without necessarily knowing when it is to come, thus missing the second key ingredient of a prescriptive-type premonition. Social media platform owners/operators though, their will is much easier to comprehend.

Whatever allows them to generate profits to perpetuate the existence of the corporation.

That's why the recent punitive actions of Facebook against researchers working on discovering how disinformation works within the platform doesn't surprise me the least. Each platform is basically its own reality, with associated physics and emergent social rules determined by the platform owner, the former explicitly, and the latter through in-world ``law enforcement'' or moderation. No matter how strong the laws of the real world may be, in the reality as defined by the platform, the source code (as controlled by the owner) is god of that world. These platforms are probably a different type of threat against the sovereignity of national governments, though they share many commonalities with the old colony corporations; the key difference being the lack of a military arm, since much of the territory is controlled digitally with little to no physical presence.

Governments tolerate socia media platforms only because the latter does not ``steal'' any physical assets away from the country/nation that the government is running. Any physical assets that are used by the social media platform (like data centres) are paid for, and so can be considered as a net gain for the government since it is contributes directly to the economy.

Digressions aside, the intersectionality between the social media platform reality and the real-world community provides an interesting study of influence and what I would unceremoniously call ``mass hallucination''. Social media platforms are walled-gardens---do not let the ease of creating a new account on any platform by anyone fool one into thinking that it is as open as going out in the middle of the street and just shouting something. The rules that operate in social media platforms, both physics and social, may not share the same values as that of the real world in which they appear in. This is well-understood by governments a long time ago, as shown by some rather draconian measures by some countries' governments to force the values to be the same through controlling the context by isolating the network to within the sovereign control of the country. What is funny though is that despite doing that, the governments haven't really taken the logical leap of running their own social media platforms for their people, to act as the modern day digital equivalent of the piazza, where the official narrative can be disseminated from a known safe source, and where the digital divide that exists between the poor citizens and the rich is bridged through universal access to all digital services and its associated discussion fora.

In many recent instances of disinformation/misinformation in social media, we find that it really is a replaying of old Cold War tendencies, except with much higher growth rates due to the ease of starting an exponential spread event. As to how such disinformation/misinformation can benefit the party creating them, I remain mystified. I know that the outcome is always about obtaining more relative power, but the path to get there which has disinformation/misinformation on issues relating to a global pandemic is fuzzy to me.

Anyway, that's enough mouthing out of me. I'm still making my way through the 1048-page The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: Book 3: Vana Parva as translated into English by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, roughly reading 406/1048 pages.

By the end of this week, the prison gates will open, and I can head out to my favourite bar to drink and read once more; a much welcomed change of environment.

And that's all I have for now. Till the next update.