Technocalypse I
ubiquity. This puts the users at a crossroads where they can either: inoculate themselves from the vitriolic mainstream by blocking users and notifying Tik Tok as to what content troubles them, or, in an attempt to stay in tune with the times, they can subject themselves to the torment of the mainstream. Both situations are unwinnable. In the first scenario, users flag content which they don’t like as ‘not interested’, gradually guiding the algorithm into pushing forward videos you’d have engaged with due to affinity rather than out of the grotesque. Henceforth, these users exist only in an echo chamber of things they are affinitive with – the nature of content and discourse would only serve as confirmation bias which they’d be more likely to interact with in a self -perpetuating cycle, as the more they find content which they like, enjoy and finding resonant, the more they will see. This cycle of confirmation bias works to calcify people ’ s beliefs. In the other instance, the user makes do with the incendiary till it becomes their norm, from which point only videos orders of magnitudes more grotesque can keep them mesmerized. Not only are these users stuck in an echo chamber that becomes more cacophonous in extremity; they’re more likely to have these ideas stick due to negative bias , which means that negative stimuli are not only more readily accepted but longer dwelt upon. The misrepresentation of these extreme thoughts as mainstream in tandem with negative bias calcifies people ’ s beliefs on the norm – that which occupies mainstream political and social discourse. A calcification which could be fatalistic in the attempt to further human social understanding. Technology’s Eye of Providence has ma imed counter-culture. The revolution counter-culture pines for often has a pivotal event. However, the instantaneity of information and response can often mean events are reduced to fleeting moments, an effect which is compounded by the near infinite amount of new information to consume which buries other events. Resultantly, counter-culture groups struggle to find a turning point, an event to rally behind, and remain on the starting blocks. Yet, when an event does occur and stays in the fray long enough to be rallied behind, technology elevates near inefficacious symbolic acts into counter- productive symbolic posts. This was most blatant during the ‘post a black square’ campaign on Instagram which was supposed to show the size of the allyship of BLM. Accor ding to Forbes, 28 million squares were posted and yet it could be argued that this show of ‘allyship’ did more harm than good. As Alex Turner says, ‘life became a spectator sport’ , the effect of which being people posting squares not to show solidarity but evade the scathing eyes of their peers – when a group is only as strong as its weakest members – people with no passion for your cause joining your ranks becomes a detriment. This takes the form of people who go to protests in hopes of escalating them, or people who claim to champion the cause whilst unable to educate their community on how to help their cause; these same people would likely have discordant views with the more aware of the pack which leads to the sort of counter-productive cacophonous discourse typical of counterculture. Bizarrely, counter- productive posts aren’t just Dadaist black squares but also dense infographics. Virtue signalling often takes two forms, the laconic in an attempt to be pithy, or the magniloquent in attempt to be meticulous, the latter being its most common form. Users on Tik Tok and Instagram subject unwitting followers to a deluge of data with no respect to the medium they’re posted on, for example: an infographic post to an Instagram story could take 2 minutes to read yet will only stay on the screen for 15 seconds; Tik Tok users will attempt to condense decades of critical theory into a one- minute video. Tik Tok’s ability to duet a video (attaching a video in response to someone else’s) means that there is no court fo r discourse but rather there’s an ever -growing range of meta-narratives which only work to disjoint a movement. If counterculture never pierces the mainstream, then there’s only a fortifying and inbreeding of hegemonic ideas which puts a halt on human social development.
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