the Facebook coma

Well, it's the better part of half a month old, but I missed this Guardian piece on the first go-round (Sept. 19) and yet gave it a half-assed read just now. Do I understand it completely? Viscerally, I felt I got it. I have always felt that as belief separates man from god, so Facebook separates the people it claims to unite. But intellectually, the essay is above my pay grade. Facebook makes me cringe and this essay helped me to see why my cringing was not in vain.

Facebook’s war on free will How technology is making our minds redundant. By Franklin Foer

Tuesday 19 September 2017 01.00 EDT

Below, just a few random snippets that caught my eye ... the piece is an easy read (written in English) for those who have the patience for a little length.

-- The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines....
-- The news feed is meant to be fun, but also geared to solve one of the essential problems of modernity – our inability to sift through the ever-growing, always-looming mounds of information. Who better, the theory goes, to recommend what we should read and watch than our friends? Zuckerberg has boasted that the News Feed turned Facebook into a “personalised newspaper”...
-- Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behaviour can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction.