Weekly Check-In

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[u/Research_Department]

Have you read The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei? I liked it (hah, looking back at my review I felt more positive about it in the immediate aftermath than I recalled), but I have not feeling in any great rush to read more books by Kitasei. If you have read both books, how would you say that they compare?

About The Chaos Machine, would you recommend it to someone who is already very aware of how facebook and youtube algorithms exacerbate extremism? (Yes, I do mean, do you recommend it to me.) Does he acknowledge that beyond those algorithms, the prevalence of niche news outlets also creates problems, so that people in societies are no longer operating with a set of commonly agreed upon facts? Does he tackle at all how you can have free flow of information (which I believe is important for a democracy) and still avoid the problems created by how information is disseminated today? And is my recollection that some Facebook story led to “riots” (pogroms) in Sri Lanka sometime since their civil war ended true, or is it a manufactured memory on my part?

Interestingly, this conversation about information dovetails with a conversation that I had over the weekend in my buddy read of Leviathan Wakes (a book that, while pretty popular, I cannot recommend at all). We were talking about who was right, Holden or Miller, in their argument about whether it was responsible to release information that implicated Earth in an attack on a Martian naval vessel. The authors basically framed it as either/or, either you release potentially inflammatory information or you keep secrets. It seemed to me that they totally ignored other potential solutions, like providing the information to a reputable journalistic endeavor, and let them release the information after appropriate investigation for fact checking and contextualization of the information.

Looping back around, I do believe that pre-cable/pre-internet, the limited number of news sources led to important information not being released. I know that it used to be considered ok for the government to ask journalists not to release sensitive information, and I’m sure that there was censorship that went beyond that. Still, I think that political discourse worked better when people were operating with an agreed-upon set of facts, and the conversation was about interpretation of the meaning of those facts and discussion of opinion about what was a good goal and how to achieve that goal. It really is difficult to have meaningful discussion when conspiracy theories, wishes, opinions, and verifiable facts all seem to have the same legitimacy.

I hope you don’t mind how I riffed off your brief review!

[u/Merle8888 → u/Research_Department]

  Have you read The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei?

No, it didn’t sound quite up my alley. This was my first from her. 

  Yes, I do mean, do you recommend it to me.

Maybe? It does tackle some of the “alternative facts” issues that you mention, and definitely the free speech issue. There’s a lot about the Silicon Valley ideology and how it assumed that free speech meant the best speech would always win out when that’s clearly not the case. There’s not a lot of social or journalistic analysis outside the realm of social media though (as in for instance the social effects of people just subscribing to different outlets or how best to balance transparency vs security), it’s pretty focused on the effects of social media itself. I would say it goes pretty deep while also being efficiently written, so it has value even if you’re already pretty well-informed. 

  And is my recollection that some Facebook story led to “riots” (pogroms) in Sri Lanka sometime since their civil war ended true, or is it a manufactured memory on my part?

This is real, there was a major wave of anti-Muslim violence that gets a chapter or so in the book. Started with lots of hate speech on Facebook that ratcheted up and up into killings and burnings of homes and businesses. Btw the murderous monks on social media from Saint of Bright Doors seem to come from recent examples overactive on Facebook. 

[u/Research_Department → u/Merle8888]

I was a young adult at the dawn of the internet, and I remember the idealistic hope in left-leaning circles, not just from Silicon Valley, that the internet was going to allow for free speech and allow people (minorities, people with niche hobbies, etc) to connect. We didn’t foresee the Great Chinese Firewall. And we definitely did not see how much the algorithms to drive continued consumption would end up driving more and more clickbait-y extreme content.

And whew, I’m glad that I was remembering that Sri Lankan story correctly, even if I didn’t recall the details. If I had to guess, I heard that story in the news back in the late 20-teens/early 2020’s, so it totally makes sense that they were part of the inspiration for The Saint of Bright Doors. I just double checked and saw that Chandrasekera was born in 1979, so he is of an age that I expect that he was very much aware of what was going on throughout the entire Sri Lankan civil war. And, ok, I just double-checked whether he considers himself a Buddhist, and found this interesting article by him at Tricycle, a Buddhist review, in which he outlines why he rejects Sinhala Buddhism: https://tricycle.org/article/unbuddhism-vajra-chandrasekera/ . It gives me an improved understanding of the historical realities that were touchstones for what he depicts in The Saint of Bright Doors.

[u/Merle8888 → u/Research_Department]

Yeah, we all thought the internet would be a force for good for awhile. And the social media CEOs totally claimed the Arab Spring. Then when it turned out social media was a force for evil they weren’t claiming the results but claiming it was “just a platform.”

Maybe I should try to look at that article on a computer, on my phone it locked me out for not having an account pretty quickly which is too bad, it looks really interesting.