The end of callout culture - and the rest of the internet

[garote]

I know a professor - an anthropologist by trade - who was chosen to act as a mediator between the state of Georgia and the organization of American Indian tribes there. He told me that when he asked the leaders what they preferred to be called, they said “Indian”. He asked why and they said “Because no one is technically a Native American. But Indian is a unique name that we can define and use for ourselves now.”

I was surprised by that, and it stuck in my mind.

Some time later, I wandered into one of those stupid this-name-or-that-name arguments on Facebook. The author of the post declared that anyone defending the name “Indian” was actively encouraging racism and merely wanted to preserve their "right" to be offensive to others.

Attempting to bring some clarity, I brought up what my professor friend told me, in detached and polite voice.

I was immediately accused of “lying to justify my racist beliefs.”

What can you do at that point except say “oh for crap’s sake” and walk away? It wasn't much later that I moved Facebook to a back folder on my smartphone and disabled all its notifications.

This is callout culture. It is a cry for attention wrapped in a call to arms. The people engaging in it may say they want greater empathy in the world, but they don't really. What they want is attention, and for the enemy they have identified to shrivel up, fail, disappear, and die. Like a fungus, it has pushed tendrils into every news and media network, but the heart of the infection is in Facebook and Twitter. (Instagram and Snapchat have their own flavor, more akin to straight-up bullying, which disproportionately affects younger people.) Something about these mediums has tricked massive amounts of people into believing that they are changing hearts and minds by punishing strangers. Or maybe not -- maybe they just want an excuse to vent hate.

But hey, we know all this, yeah? South Park threw a whole season at it last year.

Here's where things get even more interesting. Without a deep structural change, the future looks much darker.

In the technology sector we are only a few years away from constructing an artificial intelligence that can generate activity on the internet that is indistinguishable from the activity of living persons. Not random activity -- activity with motive. The ability to argue and persuade. Shortly after that we will find a way to package it, and oh yes, we will sell it.

The product reviews, the blog posts, the comments, the recycled jokes, even the editorials and essays and news reports you scour for real information, drifting down to you from beyond the people you know face-to-face, will go from 5% engineered, to 30% engineered ... to 80% engineered ... to 99% engineered ... and eventually it will all be engineered. Real people will be reduced to corks bobbing in a sea of AI-generated culture, opinion, and reporting. There will be no one online. Only screaming, whispering, capering machines.

And silicon is cheap. Imagine what it will be like when a wealthy person can rent some rackspace for a while and fire up an AI proselytizer for every single man, woman, and child on the planet, personally stalking them, making sure the buyer is portrayed in a positive light. Or, worse yet, making sure their enemies are shamed and slandered and hounded with fake outrage crippling their social life and business. Money will be more than free speech; money will do more than talk. Money will call you up on video chat, stare at you with your mother's own face, and dare you to disobey.

If we're fortunate, other technologies will compensate for this. Perhaps we'll collectively make the choice to abandon almost all online interaction with strangers. Either way, we will at least be free of the infection of callout culture: We will know for certain that it is fake, and only the product of AI zombies burning money and fighting each other on comment boards that no human may ever read.

Prepare for Interesting Times!

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Good point(s).
I believe the whole media system is already like this. Reporters etc are not representing themselves, they are mechanical parts of the unhuman being that controls them.

And the PR teams do this kind of job that you described in the second part. We can only count on other PR teams or bots to take care of fighting each other.

OTOH, what can we do? Just turn off the noise. Listen to J.S.Bach and enjoy our lives.

[zeugma92]

This is all well put. As you know, I have had many similar experiences on Facebook, although that wasn’t quite enough to put me off it for good. What finally did it was this last round of reporting about the internal culture there, plus the fact that for the third or fourth time I started seeing ads for a thing I had talked about with exactly one other person and had never, ever typed into a form on any device. People joke about how they must be listening on the device but frankly, I think it’s much worse and much creepier if they don’t have that capability yet have such a depth of data that they can guess what I might be interested in with such eerie specificity. Although I still have the vestigial urge from time to time to post something unrelated to work on there, I recently deleted almost all the activity on my personal account and when I do post something, I usually delete it just a couple days later. I’ve been on there once, for five minutes, in the past seven days and regretted scrolling even that much. The place is simply toxic.

I have been thinking a lot lately about ways I can begin advancing my work outside of that platform, and also outside of Instagram and Twitter, neither of which are really doing much for me even though I have the largest audience by far on Instagram. I’m wondering if there is any way to benefit from these platforms without being beholden to them the way I feel now. I’ve been taking a long look at Patreon and Medium and Pexels as forums for advancing my work too.

But disconnecting from these dominant platforms has also felt a little lonely, I must admit. Of course I also moved to a new city and holed up for a long time, and am only now beginning to regain an interest in spending face to face time with old friends and perhaps start making new friends too. I’ve been trying to make sure I have people’s phone numbers and default to texting them or sometimes emailing when I think of them.