The Media Landscape

[version]

Just read something interesting re: echo chambers and the splintering of traditional media, that the problem isn't that it's splintered, it's that it isn't splintered enough.

You currently get stuff from actual journalists and reputable sources alongside grifters, trolls and whatnot via social media as though it's on equal footing, whereas if it were more splintered, you'd have to go to places known for the stuff you were looking for, e.g. there'd be less grey area where people can stumble across some far right content on Twitter or Facebook as you'd have to specifically go to far right sources to find it.

 

[linebaugh]

version is leaving us for parler

 

[version]

Right-Wing Social Media Finalizes Its Divorce From Reality

Fox News acknowledged Trump’s loss. Facebook and Twitter cracked down on election lies. But true believers can get their misinformation elsewhere.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[linebaugh]

Im not sure the more ridiculous branch of conservatives will ever completely segregate- owning the libs is its battery.

 

[boxedjoy]

One of the things that's changed is that the necessity of being right (as in correct) has been replaced with the necessity of being first, and that has led to lots of sloppiness and inaccuracy.

 

[constant escape]

And the post-truth transition has introduced, or at least exacerbated, a sort of selective belief. Perhaps not exhibited evenly among people across this or that political spectrum, but the tendency is that you read something, and whether or not you file that information away as truth has more and more to do with whether or not you like the sound of it.

 

[constant escape]

Perhaps this has always been a factor, some degree of disavowal or denial or whatnot, but it seems much more pronounced in recent years. Perhaps even accelerating.

 

[constant escape]

I'm still enamored with the new field of social cybersecurity, which was mentioned by someone here a couple months ago. information/disinformation campaigns geared toward hacking the psyche, ideology.

 

[constant escape]

You can think of it as a facet of cyber warfare, wherein the troll is a kind of terrorist.

edit: or perhaps other things aside from terrorism. Maybe just attempting to slant public opinions this or that way.

 

[constant escape]

Perhaps the basis of the post-truth era is that facts are not partisan, and you can be presented with facts that contradict each other across partisan lines, seeing as partisan lines are drawn on a plane that is often orthogonal to and unrelated to empiricality. When faced with such a contradiction, of course the person opts for the fact that affirms what they would prefer to have factually affirmed.

 

[constant escape]

Certain social media are perfect media for cybernetic operations, controlling what information flows where, gets locked in which echo chambers (actually a term used by Kathleen Carley regarding social cybersecurity), which information gets buffed or debunked, which information is denied circulation and forced to stagnate, etc.

And the actual governmental parties still seem to be relatively early in mapping out this phenomena. Academia too, from what I gather. Social cybersecurity is a budding field.

Quite frightening actually, because an adept cybernetician, who is also privy to popular ethos, can command a historically unprecedented degree of power within this domain, seemingly. The unprecedentedness of this power being correlated to the unprecedentedness of the speed of information flows, and the increase of daily information throughput of the average citizen of this or that overdeveloped nation.

 

[constant escape]

Frankly a perfect medium, or set of media, to field test the kind of psychic operations I think can be engineered. The trick would be learning how to express these operations in the terms of our existing social media platforms.

Also just heard a definition of magic that was attributed to Dion Fortune, that magic is the changing of consciousness in accordance with will. That is, a willful guiding/manipulation of consciousness, as opposed to the more or less random development of consciousness that defines almost every psyche.

 

[constant escape]

But the kind of magic I have in mind would be informed by all of science, rather than opposed to it. A sort of complexity magic that is built upon an understanding of how physical systems scale in complexity, enabling the emergence of phenomena that function to hasten the very complexification of matter that gave rise to them.

Much of this hastening can be considered in terms of increasingly pseudorandom signaling between and within systems. This seems to be vital to the exponential complexification of physical systems. Having a collection of psyches, each experiencing different realities, serves to scramble up the shared language in such a way that bolsters the effect of pseudorandom signaling.

Why is pseudorandom signaling important? It increases the rate at which a system/organism encounters novel environmental factors, novel problems that require novel solutions. And increasing the demand for novel solutions seems to increase the rate at which the system/organism varies, and by extension increases the evolutionary potential of the species.

 

[constant escape]

A system that is able to send itself random signals is, in principle, extremely well poised in terms of evolutionary potential. This kind of random is, in principle, impossible, because it would entail the creation of some signal by an unknown formula, and the system needs to know the formula to create the signal. Tough for me to explain this, but it seems to be the infinity point of the evolution of a system: the ability to simulate truly random signals.

Big in cryptography, from what I gather, and that quantum cryptography brings us orders of magnitude closer to true randomness, but I'm in the dark there. I think in principle, if certain quantum technologies pan out well, it could actually deliver randomness, but again I'm not familiar enough to say for certain.

 

[constant escape]

Black box signal scramblers. If such black boxes can effectively be wired into the circuitry of this or that system, the system could, in principle, simulate waaaaay more of its environment than before. By being limited to low degrees of pseudorandomness, the system is, in a way, parochially confined to some logical parameters, not having much territory to move around in, so to speak.

Thus it can only account for whatever is in that territory, and the area of the territory is determined by the complexity of the signal it can process. Being able to simulate random signals would be the equivalent of having an infinite territory, seemingly. But perhaps it is a certain infinity, bound to a certain dimensionality. Some infinities being larger than other infinities by virtue of larger dimensionalities. 2D space and 3D space, both being infinite, have unequal infinities.

 

[constant escape]

the set of all real numbers from 1 to 5 is an infinite set, but it is a smaller infinity than the set of all real numbers from 1 to 6. Not sure what the technical terms would be to describe this difference in infinities.

 

[constant escape]

So complexity magic would be the orchestration of the cosmos according to the will of the orchestrator, perhaps. I'm sure a more precise definition can be worked out. But the point is that it could really take to the media landscapes in question.

Also not sure about how chaos magic relates to what I'm talking about. "Chaos" seems to imply an agnosis where "complexity" implies a gnosis. Both being conducted by the will, but the latter being more explicitly informed by the holistic logos we have built so far.

 

[constant escape]

Becoming a local in every possible domain. I'm not convinced its impossible, but at the same time I don't know it is possible.

 

[constant escape]

The essence of this complexity magic would be the alignment of the will of the practitioner with the scaling of the ontologies of physical systems, up to and beyond the psyche, the very order of complexity in which the will is nested.

 

[constant escape]

But it all needs to be processed in the language local to our order of physical complexity, and this translation of a virtually infinite noise into a particular signal language is arguably the essence of logos, the manner by which territory becomes map.