“Technology is morally neutral until we use it”, you probably heard me say this countless times (quoting William Gibson). In this event, below, that was live-streamed on Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitch and many other platforms on Feb 21, 2022, I discussed the future of Social Media – more specifically Facebook / Meta.
You can watch this GerdTalks Episode below.
You can also listen to it on Soundcloud.
Back in 2018, I wrote this on how Facebook was no longer ‘social’ anything – I argued that “Facebook had become exactly the opposite of social since there is absolutely nothing social about an algorithmic meta-brain whose only concern is to get inside our heads and manipulate our thinking so that it and its advertisers can sell more stuff to us.” And looking at today, this issue has become vastly bigger.
How could social media become ‘human’ again? How can we stop the disinformation, dehumanisation and dataism that has resulted from social media’s algorithmic obsessions?
I foresee that the EXTERNALITIES i.e. the consequences of unmitigated growth of exponential digital technologies will become just as big as the consequences of climate change.
In fact, today, the social media industry already has quite a few parallels to the oil, gas and coal business: while private make huge profits from extracting the ‘oil’ (i.e. user data), the external damage is left to society and governments to fix. This needs to change!
In this keynote I make some precise suggestions as to how that could happen.
Some of the key memes you can find there are:
– The more we connect the more we must protect what makes us human.
– Algorithms know the value of everything but the feeling of nothing.
– Technology is not what we seek, but how we seek.
– Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing
I explain it in more depth in this keynote on “The Future of Social Media“.
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