As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
It’s mindboggling to see them passively accept the questioning without mentioning that people are wolves and sheeples, and you don’t really need Facebook to join the two.
Platforms like Facebook only bring us closer but the rotten core is within us.
If there is a lot of food, people will lean towards sharing their food, and helping others - even anonymously in a truly "altruistic" sense.
If everyone is starving, people will lean towards violence and stealing.
Does this "expose the rotten core within us?", or is it just saying we have the capacity for both? If we were truly completely rotten we wouldn't share in either case.
The fact is that environment and circumstance are inexorably tied in with our behaviour - a fact that we seem to wish to see negatively, our ideal being a perfect person who operates with true altruism in all circumstances regardless of personal cost.
Throwing our hands up and saying "go look at yourself in the mirror" is missing the big picture in my view, which is that if you want a good behavioural outcome, the environment and context of the behaviour is one of the biggest factor, and is a big target to attempt to improve. If more people are operating in a positive environment, you get more positivity.
Personal accountability, yes, is a thing, but is quite a lot more difficult to instil and improve from within a smaller slice of the world, like an app, and is more of a greater societal concern or otherwise would require propagation of an ideal with a reach that is quite hard to achieve through your app.
I agree people are not rotten to the core but we keep blaming system and thus get rid of any personal accountability. Both are important. But so far it seems people have forgotten "looking at mirror". Everyone keeps blaming everyone else. So many conflicts would automatically get diffused if people looked within. Nobody wants to do that because it's hard. Blaming others and system is easy. Platforms providing healthy environment is equally important to personal accountability.
Also comparing our social media squabbles to food security is not right imho.
People havent forgotten anything. People are generally the same as they have always been except perhaps on average they are more educated at a global level.
If there is a lot of food, people will lean towards sharing their food, and helping others - even anonymously in a truly "altruistic" sense.
If everyone is starving, people will lean towards violence and stealing.
This seems like game theory, and there are historical incidents, like WWII where people were put into forced famines and didn’t act this way. People aren’t purely self interested or “logical” there is something else there besides self interest
>As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
That's orthogonal. Human nature is what it is, we have to work with what we have, and at best change that slowly within a culture/society.
Facebook on the other hand, and how it operates, is almost infinitely malleable, and can be changed with just programmers working on the change.
And it's not some neutral playground that's "only bring us closer" but an active agent, which has policies to create echo bubbles, stir up engagement, and use distraction and partisanship for maximum profit, and whole teams dedicated to it.
So, no it's not like a knife that can be used to cut a cake or kill a person, and it's "just up to us how we use it".
It's more like an automatic riffle with a laser guide careful designed for maximum hurt, and promoted as such to customers (in this case, advertisers), with product teams devoted to stirring up conflict to improve the riffle selling business...
It would be, if the Green Lantern ring came with teams doings psychological studies how to fuck with your mind for profit and increase your spending time with it, and if its business model was dependent on framing how you discuss and what news and stories you see...
As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
It’s mindboggling to see them passively accept the questioning without mentioning that people are wolves and sheeples, and you don’t really need Facebook to join the two.
Platforms like Facebook only bring us closer but the rotten core is within us.