Originally published at: https://integrallife.com/polarization-and-the-algorithmic-undertow/
Bruce Alderman and Josh Leonard explore the slow, invisible pull of digital systems — algorithms, platforms, attention economies — that subtly yet profoundly shape our beliefs, behaviors, and social worlds.
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I mean, these are all choices.
If you don’t like the choices you are making, stop making those choices:
- Don’t access “feeds” at all.
- Don’t rely on external authority for “facts”. The basic facts of life and reality are easily determined and the rest is mostly diversion and smoke screen. Use your eyes and ears to determine the reality around you.
- Losing local depth is very obviously a personal choice. Unplug the computer and go out in the sunshine.
- “Living inside a new reality” is not only a choice of activity, but also a choice of perspective. Just don’t do it. it is - in fact - just tech. saying it isn’t is actively chosing to live inside this dystopian ontolygy you’ve made up for yourself. Technology does not rehsape how I exist but I can see the trap of people believeing so.
I got into a discussion about this with a friend (the friendship was short-lived) a while back. He wanted to make the claim that we are living in a simulation and the reality is a terrible one wehere we are forced into this “prison”.
My question was simple "Then why do you meditate for half an hour every morning? Does that other reality that you actually visit and experience physically support this mind game you are trying to play on yourself?
My message was delivered and he stopped his droning monologue for a second. He thought for a moment about what I said. I told him it is his choice to put his on anything he wants to when he meditates - or to choose to separate himself from all that and live in disconnected intellectual theories. He only paused for a moment and then continued on. I’m sure you have seen this in people - they just go on and on with repeating nonsense, not giving anyone a chance to speak or reply and don’t even care if anyone is listening or not. They might as well be a lecturer looking only at themself on a monitor.
I don’t have patience for this and I got up and just left. Of course the others in the group never imagined you could do that - just walk away from someone speaking. How shocking.
But that’s the reality - you can actually physically walk away from discussions and physically turn off computers and choose a different activity. Away from the screen and keyboard, reality returns and the obvious becomes easily evident - that reality doesn’t have “layers”. It’s just a series of choices.
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People know language, animals don’t. The human reality has language and language constructs in it. The animal reality does not (or barely does in the case of animals that live with humans.) This is an example of a “layer” of reality. Small children don’t understand that other people experience like they do, as shown in psychological research. Other people are a “layer” of reality. The choices that we make are limited by the layers we are willing to and capable of perceiving. This is the Integral perspective. The choices we are given are contextual. Yes, we have free choice, because of our tech base and system of government, for now. What you say is true. It’s also true that people make different choices when different options are available - the universal law of economics is that people respond to incentives. Both the inner and outer view of the situation are true and applicable, and must be honored for a complete perspective on any occasion. This is Quadrants.
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I guess I worded it awkwardly.
More accurate would be to say that as deep as I get down into the layers of “new realities”, the ones that rely on technology can be obliterated by merely flicking a switch “off”. If I don’t actively seek them out, they don’t exist. They can be ignored. The world of technology does not need to be honored and it’s rules can be “hacked” with little or no penalty.
Opposite to this, these complex layers cannot force away the more “childlike”, simplistic layers such as our physical presence. We still have to eat and breathe and accomodate whatever hormones our body produces.
People respond to incentives, but these incentives can be completely false. Selling false incentives at an inflated price is what our economy has become based on. The further one goes from the immediate physical and into the technological, the greater this trend becomes until you have people paying millions of dollars for things that don’t physically exist and dissapear when there is no power supplied to it. But a juicy freshly picked apple or tomato is still a freshly picked juicy apple or tomato regardless of the more complex “layers” existing or not.
We are still only about 20 years into these new optional “layers” and their benefits to humainty are currently trending downward. The expansion of the internet around 2005 and the increased availability and sharing of information for the next 10 years from 2005 to around 2015 was incredible, but now that world is becoming increasingly flooded by junk AI data and fake information. It’s now used more to manipulate and enslave than to inform. Increasingly over the past decade, I benefit more the less I respond to the incentives of the technology world while I benefit more when I consider actual physical existence that does not disapear with a power being turned off.
I think a lot of people in the past five years are getting stuck in the concepts of “what technology might have been” and are ignoring the dystopia that is actually unfolding in the present day. It’s almost like a science fiction alternate reality time bubble hit humanity in 2012 (lol), with the dimension of “what might have been” going off into an alternate time space. Technophiles are still dreaming about the possibilities of that dimension, while the reality we exist in took a hard left and is nothing like how techno theorists are pretending it to be.
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Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we avoid lower Levels, both in physical and internet reality, because they are unappealing to us. The internet is full of the same garbage and con jobs as reality and our minds, but yeah, only endless replication. This tech can be used for booking flights, applying for jobs. It’s a dangerous game to try and define fake and real, good uses of time or whether things are worth doing. This is always Levels, and every Level reveals that the prior was an unreal waste of time that remains worth doing according to its own values. Like, the old saw, money is fake. Well, not really. Money is stored value. Your drivers license is fake, but as a document, it symbolizes something that society honors. The internet is an instantaneous communication platform. All technologies become a “bad thing” when mismanaged. Social media events have very low power, but very wide spread. They aren’t taken as seriously, but lots of people nevertheless see them. We morally shouldn’t buy firewood from Amazon, but it burns just the same in the fireplace, even if this is more intangible than actually cutting it down and splitting it and everything. The internet could be used to ethically source firewood, so why am I not doing that? Because it’s faster and cheaper and I’m Orange Meme. I guess I’m just arguing here, that the problem isn’t so much the tech base itself. The problem is that the tech base empowers us to express low Levels and pollute the public information and communication base with that. The problem is these “layers of reality” that are ourselves and our opinions and what we contribute to the public.
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