What harm can it do.
December 12, 2019 9:16 PM   Subscribe

Rosa Lyster uses a seemingly innocuous occurence with her mother on Facebook to reflect on the warping power of new media: "There is no sense to be made of it, no logic to be derived, no sophisticated or intelligent interpretation ... There’s just something fundamentally unsound about it, something scary and weird and emblematic of these scary and weird times." The Year in 5.
posted by codacorolla (53 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow that is very wise, and apt, not just in what's going on in politics around the world but also definitely how I feel navigating the bureaucracy of doctors and treatments and science and health systems and "benefits".
posted by bleep at 9:48 PM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


The thing is, there was actually a time on the internet when someone would make a website and say "type a number and see what happens" and things would happen. They did it just for fun! Like, that was actually an era of the internet. It was ~25 years ago, but it actually was! The web was new, Mosaic was new, HTML was exploding, I mean, people were really playing with this new sandbox!

I don't fault these people for doing a thing to see what happens. I fault the internet for no longer being that thing where you hit a number and something on your screen happened and it felt fun and magical.
posted by hippybear at 10:13 PM on December 12, 2019 [50 favorites]


This was good.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:49 PM on December 12, 2019


5
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:53 PM on December 12, 2019 [11 favorites]


You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
from Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man"

I find the linked content poor in quality, yet exemplary of a certain attitude, and valuable in that way.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 11:33 PM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


Thanks, I hated it.

I guess when you fancy yourself Really Smart and are extremely online, you start to think that everything that happens to you or your family is somehow indicative of something larger and you start coming up with articles like this.
posted by Soi-hah at 11:40 PM on December 12, 2019 [23 favorites]


I had to stop reading this halfway through the catalog of bizarre and depressing shit that’s happened recently.
posted by bq at 12:33 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


So many words, so little content.
posted by nirblegee at 12:34 AM on December 13, 2019 [12 favorites]


She and her friends were laughing at her mom typing '5' as such a mockable, online-clueless thing ... and then her mom admitted that she was feeling the same way even as she went ahead and did it. The old lady's not as dumb as they assumed, and it seems that Rosa Lyster & her mom share the same sense of humor. Losing the teenage "old people amirite?" reflexive snark is part of growing up.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:56 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Passing around a screenshot of her own mom being duped because she "loves" her seems kinda bizarre to me. Propping up her motivation with "love" rings false. That group chat must be pickled in pedantry and passive-aggression. Asking her why she was such a gullible idiot was also a nice touch. I guess it's comforting knowing that there are bigger insufferable jerks out there than I am.
posted by Brocktoon at 1:17 AM on December 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


I'm almost 54. This makes me wonder if I'd had a child in my twenties whether it would be such an idiot about my 'cyber' skills? ;p
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:24 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


I dunno. Someone I care about is very vulnerable to this sort of clickbait, and I find it pretty scary when I think about how that could be used. I didn't see the writer's attitude toward her mother as malicious (although I admit I don't think I'd publish a piece like this about my own). I took it as: how do we teach the vulnerable people we care for how to be safe in this weird world that makes no sense even to us?
posted by eirias at 1:26 AM on December 13, 2019 [15 favorites]


I didn't think of it that way. There's an audience out there who needs these answers to the questions eirias asks and I honestly do not know what the answer is.
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:31 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Sometimes I see those things and I type "6", just to make people wonder. Nobody has written an article about me yet, however.
posted by mmoncur at 1:32 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


The standard explanations for why things have happened this year have turned out to be as useless as the most far-out conspiracy theories.

I guess the title sounds kind of impressive, let's read more...

a “victim” of this thing called “like farming,” whereby someone “harvests likes” in order to “up their profile”

Well yeah exactly, more likes, more advertising, sell more stuff and make money. If you want to change things that understanding is actually incredibly useful.

Also what's with all the quotes?
posted by pingu at 1:51 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


First off, there's the issue of being on Facebook to begin with, which is mostly just the same sort of curiosity piquing and satisfying writ large, so the truly wise person knows to avoid more than just parts of the feed, but the very nature of feeds to begin with. The article seems to want to gesture towards how so much time spent on the internet is essentially the same sort of thing as clicking "5", we more or less know that a lot of what we read, watch, or listen to isn't something we're really all that interested in, but somehow it's suggested to us or just mentioned with some hook of "you won't believe what happened next" or "See what happens" in the cruder forms, but also works when there's the suggestion of a narrative that isn't finished or just a sense of not knowing what it seems other might know. It all gets people to click the link, see the story, to satisfy one's mild curiosity because, "why not?".

I suppose it's possible that everyone else here isn't as susceptible to such things as many others are, but given the nature of the site, that seems a bit hard to believe. Here's a post on something you may not be all that interested in normally, click the link to see what it is, isn't exactly an alien concept to Metafilter, savvy as we may hold ourselves to be. We of course trust that those posting aren't doing it maliciously and found some interest in the thing they posted, which is what makes the site fun, but it also can lead to clicking on a lot of things just because. Links we might well know we aren't interested in, but since it's there and others are talking about it, we click over to see what it is and may well end up spending a fair amount of time watching or reading something after it's clear it isn't doing anything useful for us at all.

That obviously isn't to throw shade at Metafilter, but to that the "5" thing isn't an entirely different world of internet use, more that the nature of stimulus and want for satisfaction is a hell of thing that even in the best of situations can lead to silly use of time and attention and in the worst it gets weaponized against us all. It is a real problem that the article is pointing out, one that is only slightly improved when it is our friends posting things for "likes" rather than strangers. The internet continues to change the ways we interact with each other and the machine in ways that are hard to grasp, but it is something actually worthy of attention.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:23 AM on December 13, 2019 [11 favorites]


Her mother isn’t wrong.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:00 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


Her mom typed "5" and a whole lot happened.
posted by Floydd at 3:20 AM on December 13, 2019 [21 favorites]


It must be a great feeling as a parent to know you exist to become a cautionary tale on the internet and a mocking screenshot that your grown child distributes to all her friends.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:03 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


5
posted by PMdixon at 4:38 AM on December 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


I think those harmless traps are a way for scammers to check that, yes, it's still true that there's a sucker born every minute, and that they should feel confident to proceed with whatever scam they have in mind. Because the people who type "5" are the same people who buy gift cards to reinstate their suspended Social Security numbers or back taxes, or pay $200 down to the nice man who knocked on their door saying he'll re-sealed their driveways, etc.

There's nothing new about it.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:06 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


I really enjoyed the linked piece, and was quite surprised by some of the strong negative reactions it elicited from some of the commentators here. It seemed like a good end of year/decade meditation on social media and reality.

For those that thought the author was being unkind to her mum- it seems the author has a better relationship with her mother than most, so will leave that to her own conscience. For those dismissing the article as being obtuse- "the likes are for the money, duh, there is no mystery, no off-ness here, we are living in a sensible world that is easily understood" then congrats I guess? Congrats on having a brain so powerful and broken that this world seems sensible.

We all of course import our own experience to each written piece we engage with- for me it was the realisation that I am, in age and experience, between the author and her mother, and empathised with them both. And before long I too will be typing 5, or replying to people on a message-board, in a world that I will understand less every day.

5
posted by Gratishades at 5:10 AM on December 13, 2019 [18 favorites]


I like this although it doesn't and can't draw conclusions.

Like, don't you think that things are really weird recently? Boris Johnson's hair, for instance. I don't mean that I don't like Boris Johnson's hair, although I don't. When I first saw a picture of him I was just flabbergasted because his hair was so bizarre. It was bizarre and somewhat frightening that a person who was in the public eye would have not just an extremely ugly hairstyle but one that was utterly outside any fashion or historical convention. It made, eg, punk hairstyles in 1977 look extremely normal. It was like when someone comes up and starts talking to you on the street and starts saying things that make clear that they're not seeing consensus reality, except this was a person with immense power.

It's not just the sort of Trumpian "I can look as ugly as I want and wear terrible suits and hideous ties as a sort of fuck-you to the libs and anyone weaker than me"; it's a strangeness.

The Whelk has several times made comments about how strange aesthetics are getting.

There's just some inhumanness now that is actually utterly new, so new that it breaks our brains. There may be some literal explanation that gives the material facts, but the experience of the newness is so bizarre and disorienting that it makes mere explanation superfluous.

There's something slouching toward us and I don't like it.
posted by Frowner at 5:32 AM on December 13, 2019 [51 favorites]


My cousins and friends and I occasionally share screenshots like this. We’re not mocking - it’s just really enjoyable to watch this older generation try to navigate a very confusing online world in unexpected ways. I loved how she tried to explain like farming to her mom and couldn’t, because none of this stuff really makes any sense. These screenshots also help us keep an eye out to make sure no one is being scammed or, in the case of one uncle, publicly liking and commenting on pervy stuff. 2019 has been a dumpster fire. It helps to spend time laughing with your family and friends.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 5:45 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


For those dismissing the article as being obtuse- "the likes are for the money, duh, there is no mystery, no off-ness here, we are living in a sensible world that is easily understood" then congrats I guess? Congrats on having a brain so powerful and broken that this world seems sensible.

There are significant and important differences between "this state of affairs is sensible", "this state of affairs is a situation that can be understood", and "this is non-sensical, there must be some conspiracy in the background". The article seems to lean toward the latter. In can be critiqued from the middle option without that necessarily implying the first viewpoint.
posted by eviemath at 5:58 AM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


There's just some inhumanness now that is actually utterly new, so new that it breaks our brains. There may be some literal explanation that gives the material facts, but the experience of the newness is so bizarre and disorienting that it makes mere explanation superfluous.

Eh. It's not hugely different from my experiences/observations of human behavior during the height of the Satanic Panic in the late 80s. Haircuts and Trump worship included.
posted by eviemath at 6:11 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


To be fair, it has been a while since the 80s, and there was a fair amount that I had temporarily forgotten / blocked from conscious memory.
posted by eviemath at 6:13 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'd disagree, eviemath, that the piece is overly conspiratorial but agree that there are historical parallels.

I am reminded of the the Francis Wheen book I found again recently about the paranoid craziness of the 1970's. The picture on the front shows a London newspaper seller with the headline in big bold letters announcing to the world

7 March 1973
ABSOLUTE
CHAOS
TONIGHT:
OFFICIAL

There are times when this world seems stranger than normal and I hope that we'll look back on the late '10s the same way that we can look back at the '70s, as it'll imply that we had some period of normality afterwards.
posted by Gratishades at 6:15 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


it's a strangeness.

Asymmetrical warfare: Good and coherent explanations are insufficient to the feeling of bewilderment over widespread, deliberate, and opaque untethering from reason, data, good faith, etc. Not just strangeness, but intentionally inflicted shock.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:25 AM on December 13, 2019 [12 favorites]


I guess if you haven't noticed that *everything* is a cruel joke designed to humiliate now congrats you're doing better than me.
posted by bleep at 6:39 AM on December 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


I'd disagree, eviemath, that the piece is overly conspiratorial

At this point I'm just really sensitive to the whole "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme, that the author ended up alluding to as kind of established or common belief. That is what epitomizes some recent cultural trends (in North America, at least - I can't speak to elsewhere in the world), to me. (Deleting my derail into the specific details....)

Also, a lot of what the author describes is emergent phenomena of the behavior of human beings acting individually but also being members of a group/society together and the co-influences between group effects and individual behavior. Yes, the causation and explanations in such situations are more complicated - one has to, as former Canadian prime minister Harper infamously said, "commit sociology" in order to fully understand them sometimes. As MonkeyToes said, a lot of what we're seeing currently is destabilizing, and quite likely intentionally so. Our very human natural difficulty with intuitive reasoning about second- or higher-order causation effects is being exploited; and the current state of math education is such that many folks don't have a stronger basis for reasoning about the type of emergent effects that are becoming increasingly important in current affairs, international finance, understanding propaganda, etc. But I find it quite discouraging to see folks like the author of the linked piece seemingly throwing their hands up and saying that we can't understand, so why even try.
posted by eviemath at 6:47 AM on December 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


Durkheim's theories on anomie are likely relevant to this discussion, however.
posted by eviemath at 6:50 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


The more time you spend away from scenes like a Facebook feed, the more you realize how ephemeral it is, and ultimately unworthy of your time. Typing “5” doesn’t take anything from you and even gaining thousands of likes from tricking people into typing “5” doesn’t benefit you that significantly. It’s a wash. (And frankly, I’m from a family, like the author’s, that loves to rib each other, our mom included—if it wasn’t for typing “5,” it would be for some other “mom! hahaha!” behavior.)

For me this has been the year I’ve really started yearning for life before it all got so online.
posted by sallybrown at 6:50 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


So is 5 going to become a meme now, or it already has?

I really like the author's general idea, but because I don't get the supposed humour of the screenshot, it's a bit of a weak hook for me. I very much agree though we're living in strange times, and the more access we have to information collectively, the less we seem to really know what is going on. Mostly that is because of a combination of disinformation and gullibility, but these days nothing does quite make sense. Then again, when did it? We're partly becoming more aware of it as well.
posted by blue shadows at 6:52 AM on December 13, 2019


Eva's emergent phenomena reading/watching list:

Documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

Emergent behavior in robotics

"The Force of the Pacemaker Concept in Theories of Aggregation in Cellular Slime Mold", by Evelyn Fox Keller (also an important paper in feminist philosophy of science)

Conway's Game of Life

"Emeregence" by Stephen Johnson (book chapter in the NY Times) - I haven't read this, but it seems to cover the topic from a pop sci perspective as well
posted by eviemath at 7:03 AM on December 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


I suspect that Kropokin's "Mutual Aid" is also relevant, but have not yet read it either.
posted by eviemath at 7:05 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


Thanks for those sinkholes eviemath, sounds intriguing and I'll definitely investigate this evening!

When you say that it is "destabilizing, and quite likely intentionally", who would you attribute the intention to?
posted by Gratishades at 7:10 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


When you say that it is "destabilizing, and quite likely intentionally", who would you attribute the intention to?

A good question, particularly since I was complaining just above about trends toward conspiratorial thinking, and thus should be careful not to promote such thinking myself!

My impression from what I've read is that in the US, Republican leadership and right wing media outlets are specifically pushing propaganda and overall weirdness (eg. adamantly supporting blatantly false narratives like the claim that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 US election, or that anything that Trump tweets is in any way reasonable) in order to both mobilize the folks who will vote for them, and exhaust and de-mobilize the folks who would vote against them or otherwise oppose their power grabs. From what I've read, this strategy seems to have been developed in right wing think tanks and consultancy agencies, and honed over a number of years (I note that this can happen organically, more of a "hey, this was the most effective tactic for our clients to win their election or their advertising campaign or their lobbying push last time, so let's see what else we can do along those lines" and just small, pointwise development; it doesn't require any long term evil masterminded scheme). From what I've read, Russian intelligence services also use similar tactics to try to destabilize the political and cultural structures of their opponents (which is not to say that Trump being elected, or anything/everything else currently wrong in the US, is entirely the fault of Russian propaganda - US citizens who are very wealthy and control large corporations have benefited significantly from the current state of affairs, and poured huge amounts of money into the 2016 election, aided by the Citizens United ruling). Reading about past fascist regimes, this seems to not be an entirely new tactic - it's been analyzed in scholarly works and written about in famous novels such as 1984, Brave New World, etc. And I should look up links for all of the above, and in a less busy week perhaps I will get back to this comment and add the links. My apologies for not doing so at present.
posted by eviemath at 7:27 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Congrats on having a brain so powerful and broken that this world seems sensible.

Thanks for calling my brain broken, really appreciate it this morning as I try to unwrap my fingers clenched around a despairing sense of rational cohesing teleology that is attractive exactly because it's the only thing that allows me to make sense of the world. Really helps me stay away from self-shaming about not having more hope and trust in my fellow person, especially in the direction of not believing my fellow person is going to casually and without provocation do something as cruel as tell me my brain is broken.
posted by PMdixon at 7:31 AM on December 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


The weirdness results from the chaos of capitalism attempting to harness random fluctuations of chaos. Everything has been monetized, ergo anything might generate money.

I always thought that the premise of The Matrix was ridiculous; humans as batteries is terribly inefficient. Then I think about "like farmers" and I'm not so sure.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:21 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


i mean iirc the original script for that movie had the matrix harvesting humans for their processing power rather than for like electricity or whatever. apparently the studio made the wachowskis change it because it was the 90s and the studio was super dumb.

so yeah the actual idea behind the matrix is that the "machines" are for the most part processes being run on our own brains. so from one angle, the machines are a software virus, from another angle, they're a self-destructive societally-imposed obligatory mass hallucination. you know, like capitalism. and gender.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:40 AM on December 13, 2019 [9 favorites]


What the last few years have reminded me of is nothing so much as an old science fiction trope -- humanity abruptly gets telepathy or some functional equivalent, and promptly goes insane, because it turns out that have total access to other people's every thought and emotion is a terrible thing. We thought that the internet would bring us together, but instead it's one of those functional equivalent and it's driving us insane.
posted by tavella at 9:47 AM on December 13, 2019 [12 favorites]


I liked the piece. Thanks for posting it, codacorolla. I read the piece as _descriptively_ saying that the author is having a particular experience of uncertainty and "what the hell is going on?!" and sharing a description of that bewilderment with those among us (like me!) who have felt it, not _prescriptively_ saying "and thus you should not try to understand".
posted by brainwane at 9:50 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Setting aside whatever mother-daughter dynamic is going on, the point seems to be that this sort of in-your-face clickbaiting is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. On the internet we become the sum total of all the likes we've been manipulated to click, and the opinions and values that go with them, to the extent that we hardly recognize ourselves or each other.
posted by simra at 10:09 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


> On the internet we become the sum total of all the likes we've been manipulated to click, and the opinions and values that go with them, to the extent that we hardly recognize ourselves or each other.

i'll have you know i became a far-left memelord of my own free volition i wasn't sculpted into this by the Internet at all it's all me 100% for reals yup yup yup.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:46 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Rate this translation"—I wonder what language the original version was in... *searches* okay, looks like it's "Напишите номер "5" в комментариях и смотрите, что получится!"

So it's a Russian meme which Facebook helpfully translates and propagates onto your feed for you because Facebook thinks lots of people are 'engaging' with it by commenting and FB wants to push you to 'engage with content' regardless of what that content is. The meme shows you an image specifically created to exploit the heuristics our brains use to perceive the world in order to make you see something that doesn't really exist. Then it tells you to blindly take an action to see what will happen.

Emblematic of these scary and weird times, indeed.
posted by metaphorever at 11:19 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


not believing my fellow person is going to casually and without provocation do something as cruel as tell me my brain is broken.

brokenness of brains is also a meme, pretty often used self-deprecatingly in relation to online overload - I don't think it was meant personally
posted by atoxyl at 1:04 PM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


Oh, it was a mean trick? I assumed it was a new Facebook app model, like a PWA. Ah well.
posted by alasdair at 5:28 AM on December 14, 2019


PMdixon, I'm sorry you found that comment hurtful but I genuinely don't believe it was directed at you. I could be mistaken, perhaps you made a comment "dismissing the article as being obtuse" which was deleted, but it was specifically people doing that which Gratishades accused of having a broken brain.

The only other comment from you that I see is "5". I'm sorry something bad happened after you typed it.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:10 PM on December 14, 2019


imma send you guyz some Harvey soon. stay tuned
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 12:21 AM on December 15, 2019


I'm not convinced this is terribly new. I always think of the people who watched Uri Geller on day time tv and bent their spoons to feel in on something. One older woman called in and claimed that all her silverware had been bent. Imagine her. sitting in her kitchen, dutifully bending all her spoons and forks one by one. Then telling her friends, her kids. This all during the days of satanic panics and hypnosis to learn about past lives. Dopey, attention-grabbing junk is the norm. The media just changes.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:32 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


I like the reference to Harper's "commit sociology" above, because my armchair theory is that the "weirdness" a lot of people are experiencing stems from the inability to accept on a deep level, the inability to grok, that there is not and never has been a singular culture with spin-off subcultures but, instead, there've been fully-formed, fully-developed cultures butting up against each other all along, but only one of those cultures controlled all media prior to the internet.

Put less obtusely, maybe: It doesn't matter who you are or where you are, the things you've experienced are not , and never have been, representative of the US as a whole. Personal experience only lets you guess how your neighbors will respond to something, and most people are not like your neighbors.
posted by mattwan at 11:14 AM on December 16, 2019


Had to try and step away from the participatory internet for a minute. Should probably do so more often. What was wrote: "For those dismissing the article as being obtuse- "the likes are for the money, duh, there is no mystery, no off-ness here, we are living in a sensible world that is easily understood" then congrats I guess? Congrats on having a brain so powerful and broken that this world seems sensible."

Here is the thing: I am basically sympathetic to the thrust of the article that everything is bizarre.
However, it's also extremely sensible to me that people would systematically engage in innocuous behavior with the intent of establishing social credit to use that accrued trust to bad ends. These are not in contradiction to me because frankly I find most social phenomena bizarre in ways that mostly require me to work from first principles. The thing is that I also feel really badly about being able to do this working out of causes because it's obvious to me that most people can't do it and that it makes people uncomfortable when I talk about being able to put pieces together in that way. Put together, one of the core hateful things I tell myself about myself is that I am an overly analytical monster who is unable to coexist with "normal" people. I hear that there is some relevant meme going around that this is an allusion to; I am unaware of that so all I saw that morning was someone exactly articulating one of the deepest self-hatreds I possess: I do think we live in a world that is easily understood and I also understand that that perception separates me from people, and frequently take that as a thing that is fundamentally broken about my internal processes, in other words that it's proof that my brain is broken.

Thanks to folks including Gratishades for responding in such an open way rather than matching my affect.
posted by PMdixon at 8:40 AM on December 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


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