The Medium is the Message

I didn't know what "pride goeth before a fall" meant until I got proud and fell. I didn't know what "the medium is the message" means, until I started getting so much of my news from social media.This morning on Twitter, I saw shaky phone-video of a drunken Irish lawyer berating Indian flight attendants while claiming to "run" BDS. "See?" Tweeter after tweeter said. "BDS is a racist movement, and its 'leader' is not just a hypocrite but a slattern." I can and will get this kind of anecdotal garbage from the real social world too, but Twitter amplifies it and scales it and repeats it as relentlessly as a North Korean re-education officer.If you want to know what's wrong with Facebook, just look at how it leverages its own worst tendencies to its advantage, enlisting the ADL to deflect criticisms of Zuckerberg and Sanders as antisemitic, while retaining the Republican oppo-research firm Definers to attack George Soros as the presiding spirit behind attacks on Facebook.Academic theory about the soul-sapping power of cults and the virality of paranoid conspiracy theory turn on their ability to create epistemic bubbles. Cult leaders do it through isolation, rape, starvation, and brainwashing. Conspiracy theorists do it by redefining reality. That's what Facebook and Twitter do too, by allowing their members to customize their news streams, but mostly by using big data analytics to feed them an experience that will keep them clicking (and thus target-able for advertising).