Loneliness is our Achilles' Heel

The internet is riddled with content intent on alienating people. It offers a false sense of community through exploiting their loneliness, precarity and atomisation. What should we do about this?

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Slovenly keyboard warriors spitting out toxic bile through their screens is a vast underestimation of society’s problems. 

If only it were this simple.

Far worse are the personal trainers grooming artificial intelligence to produce content for the big fight.

Much of modern disinformation comes from content farms. There may well be humans sitting around for hours in ill-fitting tracksuits. But they are much more likely to be smart people on a network of bot-controlled computers. They finesse AI generated content using algorithms trained over days and weeks to produce text and memes designed to maximise polarisation. Easily accessible OpenAI tools can create much of it, especially since the advent and explosion of articles generated solely through GPT-3 engines, practically writing themselves. 

Once cast into the right shape to trigger maximum engagement through outrage (anger or similar seems to work best), it is launched onto social platforms, like Meta / Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp groups / YouTube / Twitter / Twitch, etc. This maximises the opportunity to feed it to people to grab the greatest reaction - either ‘liking’ and / or rapid growth through sharing, or through evoking hate and angry disagreement, causing long screeds of rebuttal and further engagement signals for the algorithm to share more widely amongst people for whom it will raise hackles to ever-greater heights. Any of the above will do.

Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash

Welcome to Fight Club

And then there are the AI fight promoters, flogging their top-bill fighting segments of content and memes through paid ads to produce maximum engagement and record-breaking purses for everyone involved. And that includes the funders of the trainers and those who feed the AI products into the algorithm, too. 

The platforms take a largely hands-off approach:

“It’s not our fault that people produce content that evokes strong opinions. We are just there to promote a healthy connection between people, to aid communication. And this can only be a good thing, right?”

Wrong.

This is Fight Club.

Connection goes dark when it cleaves people into warring tribes, urging them to go further inwards rather than seeing the common connections of humanity. Even if this seems like some kind of utopia in modern times, the least we can expect from platforms that have taken citizen provided tax dollars in their nascent development is to stop making things worse. 

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction (definition): “Books about imaginary characters and events, produced in large quantities and intended to be read by many people but not considered to be of very good quality“ - Cambridge English Dictionary

What you are being served on social media and other ‘news’ feeds are not facts. It is pulp fiction for the modern world: Low-quality, mass-appeal content designed to trigger outrage and polarise, in order to monetise your attention, or to manipulate your views such that others can take advantage of your manufactured outrage. This is usually for votes or money - the votes that lead to corruption of institutions, leading to acquisition of power and more money.

This is the world we are living in. This is the world we need to be talking about, regulating more strongly and teaching our citizens to protect themselves from.

I’ll talk about how we begin to re-shape this world in a little while, but what is the world that people seek refuge from? What might be the deeper vulnerability that these algorithms are exploring?

Loneliness is our Achilles’ Heel

I gave a clue earlier when I talked about what happens when connection goes dark. What we crave is deeper than just connection. What we desire most is attachment. 

Recently, I came across the work of Hannah Arendt and her The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she wrote in 1951. Now, I’m not arguing a direct transposition of her formulation here, but perhaps what we imagine being fresh problems in society are actually old problems, reformatted. The question is: What makes people vulnerable to the type of illiberal, authoritarian memes promoted as solutions to our modern woes and being circulated and recycled using modern algorithms, much like pamphlet propaganda was circulated in past times?

Arendt’s idea is that what makes society - and its citizens - vulnerable to takeover is a lack of attachment. It is loneliness. Loneliness is “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

This is not just a literal belonging. It is actually being part of a shared sense of meaning. The algorithms drive you into the arms of others, bifurcating you into belonging to a story - no matter how toxic and illiberal. This is preferable to loneliness. Feeling a place for yourself, belonging to a story, any story is part of how you make sense of yourself, your country, your tribe, and the times you are living in. 

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

The overpowering urge to matter

We need to be in a narrative. To be visible. To matter. To be part of a community where we feel valued, and where others reflect our values back to us in a rewarding way. They reinforce us for holding these values, even if we are just performing them. Even if they bring us a hollow sense of connection, however fleeting, the sugar rush of momentary tribal connection is preferable to being invisible, disconnected, atomised, and lonely. 

The experience of this artificial algorithmic connection doesn’t have to be remotely real. It can still seduce and capture us even if selling us a compete fantasy world. For example, how many times have you felt a nostalgic longing for seemingly simpler times? A time when we all watched TV at the same time it was broadcast and came together at work to discuss the latest episode that everyone had watched. At a deeper level, maybe everyone went to the same church and believed the same thing, too. Even if your nostalgia for institutional solidity and small communities where everyone knew your name is genuinely longed for, what you think was a shared community experience may actually have been very different from your idealised picture of the world. Maybe that nostalgia is actually for an imagined past, whereas the reality was actually religious divides and racist TV shows that entrenched stereotypes that tacitly supported bullying and victimisation in schools and the workplace. 

People want to create the same thing and artificial algorithmic connection allows them to do this - to join this make-believe community that plays to their desire for a simpler life, less mental load, less stress, satisfying a nostalgic longing for an imagined, idealised, but perhaps completely non-existent past. Perhaps people are now only capable of belonging to online communities where all the pot-holes and speed bumps of a real-life have been smoothed out for them. It sounds far-fetched, but I think that this is where our atrophied skills and capabilities in managing the complex realities of our world may be taking us. 

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Creating and living in imaginary worlds

Take the anti-vaccine groups as an example of an online community of belief. Once you accept the basic premises on anti-vaccine groups, that the elites are involved in massive vaccine injury cover-ups and secret pay-offs from drug companies, and that the information is out there if only you would do your own research, and once you see the truth, then you see that actually this is about a “new world order” designed to take away your freedoms and enslave you forever - once you are inside that world, you are constantly reinforced. When you join this group, and post inside this online community, people are welcoming and write back with enthusiasm, acceptance, chiming in and agreeing with you. You are surrounded by people who express belief in the same ideas. You become bound to a tight group of people who believe all this anti-vaccine material is true, and that they have secret, valuable information that most people aren’t able to see. You are a community with privileged knowledge. 

And it all seems coherent. It all seems to fit together. You have a special access pass to a different reality. And once you’re backstage in your tight community, it’s mighty powerful - and infinitely more engaging that actual reality.  

Arendt says that we humans have most likely always been like this. Whereas in the past this secret shared knowledge giving you an all access backstage pass to the real knowledge of the world may have been invoked through membership of the church (and still can be according to recent evangelical scandals), or through civic institutions, or even political organisations, now the vector is through online communities. 

And here’s the thing. Not only is it so very easy to create these kinds of communities, it means we now never have to be alone. That reinforcing power to surround you at all times with repeated imagery and messages, is carried around with you in your pocket, your backpack, your handbag. And all of this seems more real that what you can see outside the window with your very own eyes. This is why propaganda - because that is what it is - is so effective. People can learn to distrust their own eyes, ears, all their senses. Instead, they believe their imaginations, constantly reinforced by these pocket propaganda devices.

A deeper danger to democratic liberalism

Here then is the salve to loneliness. Being connected to these online groups in this way begins to connect you to people in a way that you feel has been missing in your life. They become not only groups, but perhaps they become movements. Perhaps they become meeting-up in real-life. Sharing beliefs and a sense of coherence and belonging - hooked into a group of people with shared beliefs with, seemingly with a profound depth you may not have found in other aspects of your life. 

The darkness now descends further into even shadier realms. The nature of the group and what they believe is sets them apart from others. Where this shared belief comes under threat, where the coherence is challenged, then the response is to defend the coherence of their community and belief system. And when we have been polarised and divided through anger being the main method of engagement, then anger and violence are the potential outcomes of how tribal defences may play out. 

Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash

Loneliness is not only a public health hazard for the very personal and biological health deficits it can produce, as well as the psychological misery of the experience. Loneliness is a vector for the decline of democratic functioning. 

Not only have we been cleaved apart into false communities pretending to create connection whilst actually exploiting us for money or power, we are encouraged to react even more angrily to create a self-perpetuating downward spiral of division. 

This incivility and naked aggression shows us another vulnerability. 

We have forgotten how to disagree well 

Partly this is about shaping the environment so that we feel that if we disagree with someone about one opinion they are holding, then we must be loyal to our tribe to which we have been assigned, and disagree with every opinion that persons must hold. And then the argument becomes not just about the opinion, but the total rejection of not only the other person but everyone that they are associated with too. 

Bottom line: Regulate and educate

This isn’t about butt-cracks on seats typing out toxic tweets targeting virtue-signalling lefties. This is about sophisticated AI generated context, spewed out in massive volume using OpenAI tools like GPT-3. This is about carefully crafting and curating that content to produce stratospheric levels of outrage and engagement. This is alienating people and offering them a false sense of tribe and community through exploiting their loneliness, precarity and atomisation. And finally, this is about disabling society’s ability to disagree, and yet be able to continue to work together. 

This is about AAA: algorithms, attachment, and argument. We should be regulating more powerfully, designing programmes to prevent this content from continuing to damage the fabric of society and teach people - of all ages - how to navigate this internet safely. 

What now?

Here’s my take on what this means. We need to reduce exposure to this AAA-rated internet, and empower people of all ages and backgrounds to explore and challenge what they encounter. 

We can do this through:

1. Urgent and wide-ranging measures to regulate those platforms producing, hosting, publishing and promoting this content.

2. Developing and implementing policies to tackle profound loneliness and to address risks (to themselves and to others) of those who have been radicalised into harmful false communities that attack the very nature of nationhood and society.

3. Teaching people how to disagree with civility again. This can only happen if we tackle the first two on this list. 

What do you think? I welcome your comments on this article. Please share widely, discuss, but please be civil.

I want to help improve our experience of the internet. It still provides so much light in people’s lives, but it is dimming. 

We can save this light. But not if we carry on as we are. Because doing that hasn’t worked.