Preface: I am a vulgar person, impetuous and superficial.
I am a vulgar person, impetuous and superficial.
When was the last time you watched a documentary? When I was a sophomore (2018, four years ago), I watched "Forensic Files" for excitement during my final review.
In the spring of the third year of the COVID-19 epidemic, Changchun broke the city’s lockdown. The hard-working graduate students were not only closed off school but also locked up in their dormitories. For more than 20 days, Changchun’s growth momentum has not slowed down at all. The snacks in Tun are almost exhausted, and electronic fast food is no longer available. How can I be so happy that even browsing Douyin, Weibo and Xiaohongshu for more than 20 days is really boring. So, let’s look for a documentary and watch it (as for why we don’t learn, well, everyone has been there...)
So I looked through the documentary and recommended
the first experiment of "Slave of Habit", children resisting the temptation of marshmallows, my thoughts Back in junior high school, it seemed like Susanna had started holding class meetings to talk about moral education again. Inexplicably, I remembered Bei Dao's poem "It's a headache to meet acquaintances. They always like to bring up the past. In the past, you and I, we were all rotten fish."
Episode 1 of "The First Time in Life": Birth. Maybe it’s because I’m an awkward age (24, a young woman of the right age, unmarried and have no children), and I’m a little afraid of marriage. I was willing to continue watching "Human World", but I refused to watch "Shengmen".
"But There Are Still Books" may have been something I could read in the past, but in the past two years, I've been baptized by fast food culture and become impetuous. I didn't seem to read many books, so I quietly quit.
"Thirteen Invitations" specially selected Luo Xiang's episode. There was no problem with Xu Zhiyuan, and there was no problem with Luo Xiang. The problem was with me, because I couldn't understand their experience in discussing philosophy.
I'm really not suitable for watching documentaries.
Then I came across this one, Surveillance Capitalism: Smart Traps. Oh, capitalism, it’s about exploitation and class struggle. Smart trap, a new type of exploitation brought by high technology! But Xiaohongshu attributes it to a self-discipline documentary. So I frowned after reading it. This is the name translated by someone. It is politically correct and obscure. Then I looked through Douban and saw the translation from Taiwan Province. Well, that sounds right. It's called "Those Who Want to Go Online".
Before starting, I reflected on why I don’t like watching documentaries anymore. First, the fragmented reading of Douyin, Weibo and Xiaohongshu to obtain information made me impetuous and made me unable to calm down to read books and watch documentaries. Second, there has always been another doubt. Since we know so many truths but still cannot live a good life, why should we watch documentaries that explain truth to us? Then I discovered that this documentary is really honest and lovely.
"Even though I am an expert in this field, I still can't stop myself and my children from being addicted to the digital world." "
Even if I realize the risks of what I develop, I still can't control it, and I fall into the trap I developed."
Magic works only if people are unaware of their own mental mechanisms.
Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic at first glance. ——Clarke's Three Laws
In this world, without magic, you and I are all Muggles.
1. Major Internet companies want to make money
If you are not paying the product, you are the product.
Open your mobile phone, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Zhihu, Douban, Hupu, etc. We spend a lot of time on them every day. How much did we spend on them? It seems that there are at most dozens of members per month, who wouldn’t think that free prostitution is really delicious. Are ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent the kind people who generate electricity for love? Although there are various ways of cutting leeks nowadays, the most primitive method is always the crudest and most effective: making money = traffic + advertising.
The three major goals of making money on the APP:
① Interaction goal, increase user usage rate, so that you keep swiping your phone
② Growth goal, attract new users (pdd chops, chops)
③ Advertising goal, when the above two goals are achieved, the advertising will be more accurate , advertisers are more willing to invest money.
In the past, tools were like cars, people would remember to use them when they needed them. In the past, Baidu search was also used when people needed it. But today’s Internet companies cannot do this. In order to make money, Internet companies will make social apps a necessity of life as much as possible. In 2022, we have to lament the success of Internet companies. I look at my phone when I get up, look at my phone when I go to the toilet, look at my phone before going to bed, and even look at my phone during class in college.
In order to get people to stay more on their own apps, Internet companies will have specialized departments to study human psychology and make people addicted to the Internet.
Push algorithm, this word is well known, and Douyin plays a major role. Douyin stands out among design software because of its excellent push algorithm. My Douyin is about Lolita and Hanfu, and my classmate’s Douyin is about long-legged beauties and football games. However, the advertising links attached to Douyin are different. My little yellow car is basically clothing and jewelry, while my classmate’s is about data cables. , USB disk. Douyin’s advertisements are accurately delivered.
If you are an Internet company and want to make more money, let advertisers invest more money. If you want the effect of advertising to be more stable, the more precise the advertising, the better. Facing a large number of users, strong predictive power is required to determine accurate target customers. At this time, user big data is needed. Which picture you stopped looking at, how long you stopped, what kind of news you watched, and what kind of songs you listened to are all the data required by the algorithm. Therefore, everyone who surfs the Internet will be monitored. This is the origin of the title of this documentary, "Surveillance Capitalism", to monitor you for the sake of data.
The brief principles of algorithm calculation are also easy to understand. People can describe their own behavior as browsing Taobao, browsing Douyin, and going to Zhihu. But for computers, it can only understand the user's screen usage time, x hours spent on a certain APP, y hours spent on a certain topic, etc. It takes these behavioral parameters as input and uses algorithms to build a personal model. Then use a large number of topics as input and use the personal model inference algorithm to get the results of which topics to push. This is a simply understood artificial intelligence algorithm.
When I was learning deep learning myself, I knew that the interpretability of deep learning was really poor. You knew what the input data was, you knew the results you wanted to generate, and you knew the function of each layer of the network. For example, the convolutional layer is Features are extracted and the pooling layer is used to reduce the image size. As for why this network can produce such results, the principle is not clear, and the effect is obtained experimentally. Suddenly remembering that Tesla's automatic obstacle avoidance failed, some people speculated that it may be
difficult for the relevant technical personnel to give an answer to the real reason. Perhaps Tesla did not have enough training data on China's road conditions, which caused Tesla to encounter such a problem. It is impossible to make the best judgment on such road conditions without sufficient training.
For algorithmic calculations, humans are not humans, they are data, the very end of deep learning neural networks. As a developer of neural networks, you cannot master all the working principles of neural networks. Does it sound like AI taking over the world?
Equally important as algorithm development is understanding the mechanism of human psychology. Magicians use psychological mechanisms that people are unaware of to make illusions true. Social apps also use people’s psychological mechanisms to create exclusive happy illusions for everyone. For example, if the user keeps sliding their finger to update, the top of the display will be new content, and then sliding down will show new content. This uses intermittent reinforcement, where you don't know when or if you're going to get something, a psychological mechanism that also applies to slot machines. Some people will say, then I know this principle, then I will consciously prevent this action from happening. Maybe it will have a certain effect. But we don’t know much about human psychology. How can you compete with the powerful psychological research team of an Internet company?
2. Inevitable addiction
There are only two things in the world that turn customers into users. One is drugs and the other is software. I have been exposed to anti-drug propaganda since I was a child, and now everyone talks about drugs in a negative light, but what about software? Why are we addicted to various social apps?
Because we are human beings.
Engaging in social activities is a basic physiological need for humans, and social activities will directly affect the release pathway of dopamine. Millions of years of human evolution have made humans prefer to live in groups, seek partners, and reproduce. Social APPs provide the best social channels for modern people, which can bring people happiness and therefore make them addictive. Like drugs, after excessive use of mobile phones, there will be a emptiness caused by a lack of dopamine. Suffering and happiness should be balanced. In fact, it is difficult for us to fight against our instincts. In order to focus people's attention on social apps as much as possible, social apps carefully design functions such as forwarding, likes, etc., and try their best to influence people's emotions. In the Internet era, people communicate more frequently, and people are stimulated by various data and text. Just like people who are used to a simple diet, after being exposed to Feizhai Happy Water, they can never go back to the days when plain water is enough. Coke corrodes people’s health, but what about social apps?
After human evolution, we began to pay attention to whether people like us. When we post to WeChat Moments and gain likes, we also gain happiness. But have we evolved to care about ten thousand people? It is not a problem to become a Weibo celebrity with millions of fans. Need a little bit of social validation every five minutes? After you post a new message on a social APP, do you pick up your phone from time to time to see if anyone has liked or commented? This is the subtle change that social APP has on people. People change their lives according to the recognized standard of perfection, because posts on social APP You will get short-term rewards (such as likes and comments), and people agree with this value. But in fact, it is a kind of false popularity. Not only will it not last long, this kind of life will make people even more empty than before. When you experience this kind of happiness, there will be a seed in your heart: "What should I do next? I still want this feeling." This will subtly affect people's self-worth and self-identity.
When one, a hundred, ten thousand, or hundreds of millions of people are affected in this way, then problems will arise in the social group. The anxiety caused by social apps (such as appearance anxiety, academic anxiety, age pressure) makes teenagers and young people more fragile, more depressed, and less willing to take risks. For example, the proportion of taking the driving license test has dropped, and the willingness to make male and female friends has declined. decline. The nipple fun of social apps allows people to directly use digital nipples to numb themselves whenever they feel uncomfortable, empty, uncertain or afraid, which will weaken our ability to deal with negative feelings.
This is just a non-malicious influence on people after social apps attract their attention. So what if social apps have ulterior motives?
3. Behind the interests
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because of the existence of algorithms, social APPs will create a personal happy paradise for each person, where everyone you see are your own people and people who agree with your own opinions. Therefore, you will have your own information cocoon. With the emergence of information cocoons, you will begin to be unable to process or be exposed to information that is different from your personal worldview. People in an information cocoon can easily be manipulated by the Internet. When we are convinced of our own views, and when we see others who disagree with us, it is easy to dismiss them as heretics, even if they may only have different sides of the truth. This can easily lead to polarization, such as men and women antagonizing each other, rivals and black men in the rice circle. The risk brought by polarization is that the two parties no longer listen to the other's point of view, and neither party's goals can be achieved, resulting in a melee (such as in the rice circle). tear each other apart). Chaos will bring traffic. For Internet companies, polarization is an effective way to bring users online. They are happy to see the birth of a polarized world.
Social apps capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. What if this advertiser is not selling something? If what he wants to sell is an idea, simply using mouthwash every day will be healthier. More complex and extreme cult ideas can reach you through social apps. People at Google say that when they want to spread an idea, they will push it to people's eyes as quickly as possible. Two billion people may not have this idea, but there is a high probability of getting and accepting it.
Show me your money I can help you change the world 1%-10%
Regardless of the purpose or not, social APPs can subtly change people's behaviors and opinions.
It's the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.
Even if social apps manipulate the growing environment of young people, even if the methods are full of deception and concealment, even if people's behavior and emotions in the real world will be affected The impact is difficult for users to realize because browsing the APP online is their active behavior.
Social APPs have also become important public opinion sites because they capture the attention of most people. As a result, many social problems have arisen. From a communication perspective, fake news spreads six times faster than real news. It takes only one mouth to spread rumors, but it will take a long time to refute them. As mentioned above, polarization is chaotic. If people do not agree on what the truth is, or believe that there is no truth in the world, then there will be no solution to polarization. When a large amount of social information exposes the dark side of society, making people angry, and uncivilized behavior, and the society lacks housing, becomes more lonely, and becomes more polarized, people begin to doubt their own civilization and are at greater risk of destroying their own civilization. The documentary mentioned the spread of rumors caused by the new crown epidemic, the Rohingya genocide, and the role of Facebook, TikTok and other social apps in fanning the chaos during the 18 years of chaos in Hong Kong.
Many Internet companies will think that they have gained a kind of power and are very happy to use this power.
4. Behind the APP
Every Internet company elite who appeared in the documentary expressed sadness that our products are so excellent, but also so dangerous. There is a kind of overt derogation and hidden praise.
In fact, are these apps really as powerful as they say?
What does the algorithm do? It just amplifies people's desires. The essence is still a problem of human nature.
In the era before the Internet, there was no media to expose the dark side of society, no people marching in protest, and no confrontation. People won’t go to parties or KTVs to drink and brag to release themselves.
In my opinion, the rapid development of the Internet has only amplified the original problems. The more important role of the Internet is to deliver information to everyone faster, more, and more accurately, and to provide everyone with a platform where their speech can be seen by the world. In fact, it is still communication science, sociology, psychological effects and other sciences that existed before the Internet. The essence of Internet risks is that technology releases human nature, and ultimately we have to return to human nature.
The documentary mentioned that people will think of the simple world before various apps? But was there really no absurdity, alienation, and polarization in the world before?
Social APP is indeed a powerful and terrifying tool. It requires legal supervision, but it is not a scourge. What is truly terrifying is the human heart.
Afterword:
Even though I wrote my review after watching this documentary, I was still quite happily scrolling through my phone for the next few days. Self-discipline is something that goes against human nature, and the Internet is too in line with human nature. Therefore, watching documentaries seems to be a pleasure, but I found that watching documentaries and watching documentary analysis are two different things. This is the difference between fruit and fruit juice. Although the juice is good and seems to have high nutritional value, it removes the real nutrients. So what to watch next?