25 August

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into arguments. You can get lost in the weeds of the ‘content’ of those arguments. It’s irrelevant. The content of social media is just one thing - arguments. That’s what drives activity and the algorithms. Everything in human life is transformed into a pile-on, between rival social groups. Mimetic theory explains what this shift means, in the deepest anthropological way. As social animals, the currency of all human life and thought is status. Social status is what gives a social animal identity. Humans achieve status by emulating high status others, in groups. By imitating one another in a group, imitating the higher status person. Then in rivlary with competing groups. Imitation is what humans do to the exclusion of all else. But they imitate to attain status. Social media is an imitation machine, that’s obvious to see. A machine of viral trends. It unleashed uncontrolled imitation in our societies. That’s the root of all social collapse, and why everybody is getting angrier all the time. The rivalry over status is now industrialised and incessant. The Argument Machine never sleeps. Right now it’s battling AI, to try to stop it replacing social media as our main anthropological tool. With viral fictions like ‘AI slop’.