…s when he talked about how his own thoughts had evolved since his early boosterism of social media. “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,” he said, “was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
…ies, while useful, are not true. They are simplified models that we create to understand the world. Just because we have decided to establish a cause and an effect between a series of events doesn’t mean that these relationships concretely exist in the real world. In fact, most of them don’t — at least not in the way that we think.
“Quite a few times — this feels like it usually happens in a ‘comedy’ where the joke is that a woman will only sleep with a man because she is too drunk to say no, or the men specifically target the drunkest woman in the room so they have the best chance of having sex — there seems to be an extremely loose understanding of consent. This is too often accompanied by descriptions of these female characters as LITERALLY ‘dressed like a slut’ or ‘wearing too much makeup’ or ‘acts like a ho’ or, in the worst cases, the character’s name is Slutty Girl #1 as if it’s the woman’s fault for getting raped. Truly infuriating.”