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m_d_hI feel I owe it to myself to read a book about Dark Matter and Dark Energy after reliving that seemingly paranoid fantasy about stochastic time bombs.
There's one "paranoid" fantasy I experienced during my Wild Week in 2003 that did come true. I predicted the rise of social media algorithms that would censor our posts and decide for us which of our friends' posts we would see. Back during my Wild Week, this terrified me because I believed the algorithms would use this power to divide us into warring camps.
Well, that actually happened. And it's why I won't use any social media service that won't allow me to opt out of the algorithms. If I follow you, I want to see everything you post, in order, along with everybody else I follow, in order. If Twitter forced me to view stuff out of order, then I'd quit Twitter.
That billions of people casually allow their social media sites to decide which posts of their friends they'll see, and in which order, continues to shock me, all these years later. That as a society we don't care about the results of these algorithms, continues to shock me.
So, maybe solving the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy would lead to the invention of stochastic time bombs. But, I can read a book about these mysteries without offering a solution to them.
Meanwhile, my solution to social media algorithms is to quit them.
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When I pick up my fiction story again, during NaNoWriMo (November -- National Novel Writing Month), I'll have to let my characters experience a stochastic time bomb. B did say it was a cool sci-fi idea.
There's one "paranoid" fantasy I experienced during my Wild Week in 2003 that did come true. I predicted the rise of social media algorithms that would censor our posts and decide for us which of our friends' posts we would see. Back during my Wild Week, this terrified me because I believed the algorithms would use this power to divide us into warring camps.
Well, that actually happened. And it's why I won't use any social media service that won't allow me to opt out of the algorithms. If I follow you, I want to see everything you post, in order, along with everybody else I follow, in order. If Twitter forced me to view stuff out of order, then I'd quit Twitter.
That billions of people casually allow their social media sites to decide which posts of their friends they'll see, and in which order, continues to shock me, all these years later. That as a society we don't care about the results of these algorithms, continues to shock me.
So, maybe solving the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy would lead to the invention of stochastic time bombs. But, I can read a book about these mysteries without offering a solution to them.
Meanwhile, my solution to social media algorithms is to quit them.
-----
When I pick up my fiction story again, during NaNoWriMo (November -- National Novel Writing Month), I'll have to let my characters experience a stochastic time bomb. B did say it was a cool sci-fi idea.
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Date: 10 Sep 2020 04:21 (UTC)You are so much better off not even having a Facebook account.