---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 6:23 PM Subject: Team Human and Facebook To: [email protected] We’ve all had quite a week or two, between Facebook/Cambridge-Analytica, and all sorts of US government confusion. A lot of us who have been critical about social media surveillance for a long time felt vindicated by the most recent sets of revelations about how Facebook and its clients have attempted to arrest our collective cognitive functioning. But it’s small consolation, given how screwed up things feel. That said, the emergence of a thoughtful, humanistic, and determined teen-driven social movement is encouraging. Maybe, finally, the “screenagers" I thought would arise from the interactive era have arrived. And instead of expressing themselves through their screens, they’re using these platforms merely to organize - and the real world to express themselves. As for me, a lot has been happening. I posted four new Team Human shows <http://teamhuman.fm> recorded live at San Francisco’s Gray Area for the Arts historic Grand Theater in the Mission. These were two of my favorite evenings of all time, and I’m so glad they are preserved for posterity. They include interviews with Annalee Newitz <http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-75-live-at-gray-area-pt-1-annalee-newitz/> , Howard Rheingold <http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-76-live-from-gray-area-foundation-for-the-arts-pt-2-howard-rheingold/> , Lauren McCarthy <http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-77-live-at-gray-area-night-two-pt-1-lauren-mccarthy/> , Erik Davis, and Josette Melchor <http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-78-live-at-gray-area-night-two-pt-2-erik-davis-and-josette-melchor/> as well as monologues that preview my upcoming TeamHuman manifesto. Yes - the book is done! I love it - which I don’t usually say. It will come out in January from WWNorton. It feels like years away, but I’m guessing the world will be even more ready to reclaim its humanity in a few months. Being early hasn’t always been a great strategy for me, anyway. I also wrote two OpEds about the Facebook revelations. Old news, of course, but new confirmation and public outrage. I’ll paste both below, so you can see the difference in the way this gets framed for CNN vs. the way it does for the LATimes Sunday section. Again, this is stuff I was writing in Program or Be Programmed back in 2011, or Coercion back in 1999. But it took twenty years for people to believe it was possible, I think. Have a good week; I’ll try to make this a weekly correspondence from now on. My best advice right now is to focus on the positive. Think of ways to say yes. There’s so much pre-emptive negativity going around right now, and I totally get how it may feel safer to dismiss new possibilities than to hope for something that doesn’t work out. But if you’re still alive, it means you can still speculate, reach for the light, and support others trying to do the same. *CNN: I ditched Facebook in 2013, and it's been fine* *Douglas Rushkoff * You can ditch Facebook. It's OK. You will survive. And not only will you get through it, but your life will get better. This month's revelations that Facebook had sold, released or lost control of millions of users' data has left many people wanting out -- but wondering whether they can leave the social media platform they and hundreds of millions of others around the globe depend on. I'm here to tell you can. I left Facebook in 2013, declaring here on CNN that "we are not the customers, we are the product." And we now have proof this is true. Facebook was not breached or hacked by Cambridge Analytica. The Facebook platform was doing exactly what it is programmed to do: Harvest our data, identify our psychological triggers and then manipulate our behavior. As users are finally realizing, neither Facebook nor the compliance professionals purchasing your data from them care about your secrets or your sex life. They care only about your raw data, from which they can infer your psychological vulnerabilities. It's not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product, or vote for one candidate or another. It's that the techniques they are using intentionally bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy, and go straight to our reptilian survival instincts. Our neuroses are like blind spots. Once identified by the social media psychologist, they become access panels to the more impulsive parts of our brains. Facebook can target and trigger us through terror. The network's techniques don't appeal to our logic or empathy, but to our deepest-held fears. Their tactics are aimed directly at our brain stems -- the part of our brain that acts and thinks like a reptile: Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. We've seen the impact of this technology on our social and political discourse. We may have real things to be angry about, but when these are the only stimuli delivered by our social media, we can end up living in a state of perpetual paranoia and rage. No, it's not fun. But it's also a tremendous public health hazard and threat to democracy. Democracy requires an informed, thinking public. So, whether you want to be a more responsible citizen, or simply a happier person, you owe it yourself to get off Facebook any way you can. And I'm here to tell you, you can do it. You are going to be OK. It's not so bad. In fact, it's better. First off, you won't be pinged by those friends from second grade whom you have spent the last 40 years trying to forget. Is that sad? Maybe. Until we migrate to a less corrupted online directory of names and emails, people you no longer know may have a harder time locating you. But that means you will be forced to spend your time and energy interacting with people who are in your life. Real world interactions allow you to establish rapport and bond in ways that just don't happen online. Several hundred thousand years of human evolution have been dedicated to face-to-face interaction. That's the only way for pro-social hormones such as oxytocin to get released into the bloodstream instead of the stress hormones, such as cortisol, which are released by social media use. If the teenagers in your life can't reach you through social media, they will ultimately use it less. The less they use social media, the less likely they may be to be depressed or commit suicide. Another great ancillary benefit of getting off Facebook. Facebook's useful function is that it lets us find and communicate with people -- like an interactive phone book. Luckily, there are many ways to gain that same utility, without making ourselves so vulnerable to psyops. If Facebook is the only way your relatives let you interact with them, then that's already a problem. Accepting this restriction on your relationships is acquiescing to a system that values pings more than contact. You can still email, Skype and FaceTime, share photos through web pages, iCloud and photo streams, and create Google groups and live hangouts. But even more important and fulfilling, you should accept fewer substitutes for getting together with your loved ones in real life. You also get your time back. Every minute off Facebook is a minute you can choose to spend with another person, forging psychologically healthy relationships instead of submitting to a company that is actively trying to undermine them. Best of all, you get to live life free of the constant psychological abuse inflicted by companies that mean to undermine your social relationships, and governments that mean to undermine your faith in democracy, government and human nature. You get to leave the dark place, and step back into the light of day. Pressuring Facebook in this way also serves those who may be less privileged than you -- people whose home loans, parole hearings and immigration status is affected by the data they thought they were sharing in confidence through social networks such as Facebook. Recently, China revealed how their citizens' social media connections and "likes" are used to determine their eligibility for jobs and visas. You say, "That can't happen here," but it is already beginning. And if we are still a free country, then you should feel free to leave Facebook without consequence. You can do it. I know you can. *Los Angeles Times: How Facebook Exploited Us All* *Douglas Rushkoff * It's even worse than I feared. I left Facebook in 2013, less for my own sake than for what my presence on the service was doing to others. I knew that anyone who "liked" my page could have their data harvested in ways they wouldn't necessarily approve. Over the past five years, people have not only become aware of this devil's bargain but accepted it as the internet's price of admission."So what if they have my data," I saw a graduate student ask her professor this week. "Why is my privacy so important?" Bully for you if you don't care what Facebook's algorithms know about your sex life or health history, but that's not the real threat. Neither Facebook nor the marketers buying your data particularly care about what you do with your clothes off, whom you're cheating with or any other sordid details you may find embarrassing. That's the great fiction of social media: That you matter as a person. You don't. The platform cares only about your metadata, from which they can construct a psychological profile and then manipulate your behavior. They have been using and selling even the stuff you thought you were sharing confidentially with your friends in order to identify your neuroses and neurotic vulnerabilities and leverage them against you. That's what Facebook markets to its customers. The company has been doing it ever since its investors realized that, as owners of a mere social network, they would become only multi-millionaires; to become billionaires, they'd have to offer something more than our attention to ads. So they sold access to our brain stem. With 2.2 billion active users, Facebook knew it had a big-data gold mine. While we've been busily shielding what we think of as our "personal" data, Facebook has been analyzing the stuff we think doesn't matter: our clicks, likes and posts, as well as the frequency with which we make them. Looking at this metadata, Facebook, its psychologists and its clients put us into different psychographic "buckets." That's how they came to be able to predict, with about 80% accuracy, our future behaviors, including whether we're going to go on a diet, vote for a particular candidate or announce a change in sexual orientation. From there, the challenge is to compel the lagging 20% to fall in line — to get all the people who should be going on a diet or voting for a particular candidate to conform to what the algorithms have predicted. That's where companies like Cambridge Analytica come in. They paid thousands of people to take psychology tests and to surrender their own and their friends' Facebook data. Then they compared all this data to infer how each of us would have answered that psychology test. Armed with our real or algorithmically determined psychological profiles, Cambridge Analytica surmised our individual neurotic makeups. And they figured out how to terrify each and every one of us. That's the greater collateral damage of social media. It's not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product or vote for one candidate or another. It's that their techniques bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy and appeal straight to our reptilian survival instincts. These more primitive brain regions respond only to primitive stimulus: fear, hate and tribalism. It's the part of us that gets activated when we see a car crash or a horror movie. That's the state of mind these platforms want us to be in, because that's when we are most easily manipulated. Yes, we've been manipulated by ads for a century now. But TV and other forms of advertising generally happened in public. We all saw the same commercials, and they often cost so much that companies knew they had to get them right. Television networks would themselves censor ads that they felt would alienate their viewers or make fraudulent claims. It was manipulative, but for the most part, consumer advertising was aspirational. Facebook figures out who or what each of us fears most, and then sells that information to the creators of false memes and the like, who deliver those fears directly to our news feeds. This, in turn, makes the world a more fearful, hostile and dangerous place. To ask why one should care is a luxury of privilege. Data harvesting arguably matters most when it's used against the economically disadvantaged. It's not just in China that social media data are used to evaluate credit worthiness and immigration status. By normalizing the harvesting of data, those of us with little to fear imperil the most vulnerable. When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, a friend of his expressed surprise that people were surrendering so much personal data to the platform. “I don’t know why,” Zuckerberg said. “They trust me. Dumb ...” We may have been dumb to trust Facebook with our data in the first place. Now we know they've been using the data to make us even dumber. Douglas Rushkoff is the author of 15 books, most recently "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus." ---- This is RushkoffList, a monthlyish update and advance look at work in progress. Feel free to forward to your friends as long as you include this footer. 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