Reverse Engineering

There’s a reason it’s called doomscrolling and not hopescrolling. Social media algorithms favor doom over hope, lies over truth, hate over love. The most unscrupulous content creators figure that out in no time. In order to stand out, make their posts go viral, amass a huge following, establish a brand, profit off peddling that brand, they have to feed the beast. Doom, lies, hate.

I do not believe the artificial form of intelligence that rules over social media platforms deliberately engineers these platforms to prioritize doom, dishonesty and disdain and actively discriminate against hope, truth and love. The engineering simply aims to capture audiences and deliver them to advertisers by keeping users forever logged in, perpetually scrolling. It so happens the most efficient way to do this is to alarm people, agitate them, put them on edge, keep them there.

Vice has always had certain advantages over virtue. There’s the old saying that a lie is already halfway around the world before t…