Remake the brains, rebuild my name

May 6, 2019 5:16 PM

"Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance?" ... "What’s at stake right now is not simply about hate speech vs. free speech or the role of state-sponsored bots in political activity. It’s much more basic. It’s about purposefully and intentionally seeding doubt to fragment society. To fragment epistemologies." danah boyd: Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation
posted by cashman (13 comments total)

I guess nobody told you a little knowledge is dangerous



(hat tip to the post title)
posted by newpotato at 5:31 PM on May 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

see also: wilfull ignorance

But really, this is old news. Manufacturing and exploiting ignorance is a mature industry on the US right.
posted by Artful Codger at 6:25 PM on May 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

I liked the article.

I guess there's a time and a place for everything, but to ask individual librarians to:

understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

seems so one sided and such a huge task.

Besides heroic individual efforts to tip the scales, is it polite to even wonder if those billion dollar companies have any duty to their audiences? How can we make them accountable for the profitable ignorance and hate they are spreading?
posted by haemanu at 6:42 PM on May 6, 2019 [10 favorites]

I got a copy of the book Agnotology but I'm not really sure I'll be able to make myself read it. The situation is incredibly depressing to me, and I don't mean like, "Oh, I'm sad."
posted by glonous keming at 7:02 PM on May 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

YouTube is the primary search engine for people under 25. It’s where high school and college students go to do research.

Is this true? That sounds horrifying. How do we know this to be true?
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:22 PM on May 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

How do we know this to be true?

A good amount of boyd's past output treats how younger cohorts engage with the internet.
posted by salt grass at 7:28 PM on May 6, 2019 [9 favorites]

Exploiting Capitalism's tools is the way of the now, and future, for good or ill (was it ever different?).

How much research even occurs in libraries? Surely 'actively be[ing] there when people are looking' is ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. It's the other end - the whole education chain from birth onward, and conscious querying all the way.

I'm horrified when I see how others search - just words, no domain\country coding even, and totally uncritical about what comes back. Explaining what they have on their screens is a losing game, not worthwhile.

I couldn't imagine using yt for 'research', it'd swallow all my bandwidth.
posted by unearthed at 7:36 PM on May 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, most of Silicon Valley in the late 90s and early aughts was obsessed with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. How did they not recognize that this book was dystopian?

Because it wasn't. A dystopian novel is one that describes a world we might be heading into, if particular trends or human tendencies are allowed to remain unchecked. Snow Crash is a romp in a playground, one dangerous enough to be worth reading about, but it was not intended or read as a warning about a realistic prospect for neurolinguistic hacking.
posted by ocschwar at 8:32 PM on May 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

Ironically, for some topics YouTube "research" is the only reasonable way to unearth video records of past events. There's a massive long tail of contemporary secondary source material on a vast array of topics. Most, though by no means all, of those videos are available elsewhere, but often essentially unsearchable without specific knowledge of the content beforehand or involving a request for actual film from some library or archive after poring through their catalogs.

Unfortunately, the reliance on gamable algorithms to surface content to users combined with the constant active exploitation of said algorithms by bad actors means that the useful stuff is often drowned in a sea of crap, subtle propaganda, and outright lies.
posted by wierdo at 10:44 PM on May 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

My take is that while there's no question that there are concerted efforts to spread disinformation and sow doubt in belief, for the end results to be gained there still requires attachment to a new set of beliefs for values to shift. Acceptance of ignorance wouldn't allow that, it's that the doubt sown leads to an alternative sets of beliefs that makes the efforts so harmful. Knowing the limits of one's knowledge can be beneficial if that awareness is embraced. It's acting out of an ignorance one holds as truth that causes the problems.

There is, of course, also the desire to cause some to retreat entirely from the search for knowledge by making it more difficult to assess claims, but that speaks to a slightly different issue, one of solipsistic understanding, where one's own ignorance is held to stand for that of all. Individually we may not be able to replicate or even understand the science that informs the knowledge around climate change, but holding our individual ignorance as thus defining the truth on the issue and thus being representative of the greater whole of society is the key mistake, not the ignorance itself which is just part of the human condition.

None of us can "know" everything, but we can accept that our lack of knowledge doesn't hold for everyone and some do indeed know things we don't. Assessing those claims is less about the knowledge itself and more about how we evaluate our place and that of those making whatever claims within the larger community of humankind. I accept climate scientists know what they know because I roughly understand how I know what I know and can extrapolate from that to how other humans make assessments. The failure is more in our grasp of self knowledge and its limits than in ignorance of specific claims exactly.

We accept what we want to believe because that best fits our desired view of self and the world, we accept doubt when we don't want to engage with the consequences of knowledge that calls that view into question. Breaking that pattern requires some level of acceptance of our own limits and also some leap of understanding, less of any specific claims though, and more about how people relate within society and where any knowledge comes from, which we are often really, really bad at.

As admirable and necessary as the efforts to combat the flood of misinformation are, the rising tide of lies won't be stopped fact by fact and will need to be combated by building or reinforcing better understanding of human relationships and how knowledge in general is developed within that social order. Western civilization is reaching the final chapter of that "heroic" myth of individual exceptionalism and we desperately need to find a new story of communal responsibility to replace it or it may be the last story ever read.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:49 AM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

"As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden"
posted by clavdivs at 4:14 AM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

It's a structural model. Social media's "like" features strongly favors the witty hot-take with emotional resonance over deeper examination. The story that NASA didn't have the right sized space suit for a female astronaut propagated much faster than the story that Koch had done the mission rehearsals on Earth in one suit variant, a significant level of labor went into prepping that variant for Koch's use on the ISS, but unpredictable body changes due to microgravity made that variant uncomfortable for Koch. The soundbite spread a lot faster because it was shorter, and allowed for the reader to feel more clever than the space agencies involved.

And I feel like The President has been manipulating that for some time, by tweeting outrageous statements that, in the course of politics, mean absolutely nothing. But people have feels when the POTUS gets into a twitter argument with the Chief Justice, or yells about a horse race. So it trends, the twitter commentary trends, mainstream media covers it as a significant story of the cycle, and it shows up here on metafilter because we get to pat ourselves on the back for being more clever.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:41 AM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]

"Teachers and family friends had always commented on Sam’s kindness and especially his gentleness toward the “underdog.”

"... But I wanted to like them because everyone else hated them.”
posted by amtho at 7:48 AM on May 7, 2019