
Ex-Facebook Executive: “You Don’t Realize It but You Are Being Programmed” - Jerry2
https://medium.com/@mustaphahitani/ex-facebook-executive-you-dont-realize-it-but-you-are-being-programmed-618242134d
======
bwang29
To a larger context beyond Facebook, how else human life could be without
getting programmed? Any exposure to culture literally is a process of being
programed from shopping at BestBuy to watch a movie in a theatre to take a
flight with first class and economy cabins. Maybe the argument here is "The
short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops" but is there any study that long-
term loops aren't just as powerful as short term feedback programming? Or I
guess the concern here is the centralization of programming done by one
company, but then again, the process is centralized, but the content is still
diverse and mostly created by those who'd have done the programming outside of
such process.

A fair argument could be the programming now is much more organized and can be
done more efficiently toward a certain goal, but I don't think having more
efficiency in this context is necessarily a concern - most concepts that can
be programmed can also be re-programmed just as quickly. If Facebook is
willing to expose a button to de-program a user they should be capable of
doing that.

We might become inconsistent as individual human beings from this, namely what
I believe yesterday is different from what I believe today or the next hour
due to facebook, but later on some other programming might ease this confusion
and convince you that nature is just as inconsistent as you.

~~~
devilmoon
You seem to think that the problem lies only with people being programmed to
buy things - the choice of word is probably not helping here a lot - but the
real issue here is about the validation loops people experience when on social
media.

It's not that someone else is programming you to vote candidate X instead of
candidate Y or that now you want to buy brand Z, it's that we are rewiring our
brains to follow the short-term feedback loops in how we act within society,
i.e. we don't go places anymore because we want to experience something new
but to share the simple fact of going somewhere with our networks and getting
validated by them. I think that's the bigger issue here.

~~~
bb88
> ... but to share the simple fact of going somewhere with our networks and
> getting validated by them. I think that's the bigger issue here.

This isn't a new phenomenon. We see this in the form of companies branding
strategy. The more you see the brand on the people you respect, the more
likely you are to buy it.

A couple of examples.

1\. Michael Jordan and Nike. Air Jordan's became the shoe to own in the
1980's.

2\. Apple gear. Apple chooses their gear to be instantly recognizable. If you
buy a mac book pro, say, you are extending their brand, unless you hide the
apple logo somehow.

You also see this with brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle,
Hollister, and RVCA, where they sell clothing with the brand front and center
on it.

So in 2018, the game is being played on Instagram and Facebook instead of
college campuses and high schools in the 1980's.

~~~
crtasm
>unless you hide the apple logo somehow.

I once bought a macbook pro while providing tech support for an organisation
that used them exclusively. One of the first things I discovered when setting
it up was that it takes three layers of silver gaffa tape over the apple to
completely hide its glow.

------
nemild
The visual image I like is that we're all puppets influenced by the media
sources we consume. Each media source is shaped by its business model — and
other goals, which gives us a (statistically) biased view of the world (e.g.,
social feed algorithms and engagement).

See the puppet images we made in this media literacy guide:
[https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer](https://github.com/nemild/hack-
an-engineer)

(Contributions welcome)

Ideally, we are individually able to realize this — and cut some of these
strings.

~~~
pishpash
Or go out and read more sources as this system originally intended. It's not
like they are unavailable. Can't blame Facebook for sheer laziness.

------
crispinb
Every time I hear guff about how magnificently 'digital natives' negotiate
technology, I have to refrain from being the pain in the arse who points out
that perhaps one in a hundred knows how to do anything more than tap where
entrained by a corporate interface.

------
netsharc
I've realized in regards to 2016 elections, and probably Brexit vote, when you
can't hack the election machines to give you the results you want, you hack
the electorate to accomplish that. As a bonus, unallowed entry to computer
systems is illegal, putting targeted ads and spamming Facebook/Twitter with
bots? Not really illegal...

~~~
maxxxxx
Politics in a democracy has always been always been about hacking the
electorate. It just seems that the tools for doing this are becoming more and
more powerful.

~~~
indigochill
I think it's not actually about becoming more powerful, but about being
obscure. Long before Cambridge Analytica, presidents were still winning
handily by hacking the electorate with expert use of mass media. Kennedy
dominated television and won. Before him, it was Roosevelt on the radio.

The trouble is that like any other virus, people build up an immunity to the
tricks on established platforms. You're not going to see another Kennedy or
Roosevelt using the techniques they used, and it'll even be difficult to pull
what Cambridge Analytica did now that that cat's out of the bag.

If you want to remain as effective as them you need to keep pushing and
capitalize on the next mass media platform before people realize what you're
doing.

~~~
maxxxxx
What scares me is that a large number of very bright people nowadays work at
places like Google, Facebook and others whose ultimate business model is to
hack people's psychology to entice them to buy more stuff. What they are
working on will be the perfect toolkit for dictators to manipulate people.

~~~
indigochill
Advertisers have been doing this as long as there have been advertisers. One
that really blows some people's mind (although it's reasonably well-known by
now) is that although hardly anyone thinks twice about a diamond engagement
ring, the notion we have of diamond rings today was invented by advertisers in
the 1940s:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-
an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/)

Similarly, Americans will ask for a Kleenex even when they don't actually mean
a Kleenex-brand tissue. I didn't even think twice about this until I moved to
Europe and it was pointed out how weird that was.

It's true the big tech companies make it easier to target segments of people
by collecting data, but pervasive mass manipulation is hardly new or unique to
big tech companies and generally it doesn't need nearly the amount of data
that they collect. People are generally similar enough to each other
psychologically that you can paint with broad strokes like demographics and
still hit most of your target (and interestingly, some of the most viral memes
have no particularly targeted message).

------
Liquix
Palihapitiya is a great speaker and very brave for owning up to what many try
to downplay their involvement in. Here's a link to the video this article
pulls from, it's succinct and really hits home:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78oMjNCAayQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78oMjNCAayQ)
[4:05]

~~~
equalarrow
Brave, huh? I guess I will give him some credit for owning up to this, sure.
But his only repercussion from helping create this is 'guilt'. And from the
looks of his wealth and new ventures, I don't think he wastes any time with
his guilt.

Meanwhile, the world burns..

~~~
psyc
We don’t know anything about his inner life, and the hell of real guilt cannot
be overstated.

------
leephillips
Palihapitiya and Parker seem to disagree about something important. Parker
says that the psychological programming was deliberate:

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with,
because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” he said. “The
inventors, creators [...] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

But Palihapitiya says,

“Because your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed.
It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re willing to give
up”.

Does Palihapitiya not realize that the programming he decries was built in to
the system deliberately by its designers? Or is Parker wrong?

~~~
wavefunction
I don't see how their views conflict. Parker is claiming that facebook is
intentionally manipulating its users while Palipapitiya is claiming that the
users are largely unaware of the manipulation. Their claims are orthogonal and
can coexist quite easily.

------
jstewartmobile
This is as old as mass-media. The formula has been `money -> propaganda ->
control` for at least two centuries now. Social media just put it on steroids.

Limiting paid propaganda would help, but that's sacrilege in our ad/media
driven economy, so the ultimate lesson is probably just "don't be poor".

------
rhizome
There's nothing new in this post that didn't exist 4 months ago when
Palihapitiya said the words.

------
ChuckMcM
I have hope for (but low expectations) that this sort of realization that the
'free' media is being bought and paid for by people who want to manipulate
your opinions and actions, will encourage more people to subscribe to media
sources with better transparency.

------
textmode
"He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they're too smart to
fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best-
and-brightest are the most likely to fall for it, "because you are fucking
check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.""

What does he mean when he says "check-boxing" and how does that relate to the
"implications of social media"?

Does he mean "approval-seeking" and the idea that this is what Facebook uses
(e.g. "Like" buttons) to "engage" visitors (while gathering data about their
lives, personalities, etc.)?

Anyone have a different read?

~~~
sgentle
In this case I would read "check-boxing" as "reducing to a simple optimisation
loop without considering the implications of what you're optimising for".

Granted, I'm doing some pretty heavy interpretational lifting there, but that
optimisation loop is something I see as common to productivity, video games,
social media, and many other obsessions of the nerdosphere. It feels good to
give your optimiser a constant stream of feedback, even if trivial.

Of course, now our optimisers are being manipulated by much larger optimisers
that run on engagement metrics rather than dopamine. Where did the intuition
to build these myopic hyperoptimisers come from? Surely not the same people
who grew up minmaxing character attributes or building spreadsheets for
optimal daily task efficiency? When you gaze into the optimiser...

Weird that we managed to turn society into a GAN.

------
hi41
Radio, a technology which most us would consider old, was used extensively
used to brainwash the populace in Rwanda to commit grave crimes. How is the
current technology any different this time,

------
bovermyer
This reminds me of the novel Daemon.

Not to give too much away, but the main way that the antagonist in the book
preys on people is not by hacking their devices, but rather by hacking _them_
through complex, technology-assisted social engineering.

~~~
api
That just sounds like realism.

------
mkovji
Hmmm i guess facebook is the IDE that's used to program me and each post is a
line of code.

------
callesgg
I doubt that Mark understud what facebook was before it got to what it is. How
could he.

