The Algorithm of Evil | Cassandra Voices

Yet, the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms are engineered to exploit our primal instincts for validation, status, and mimetic desires (adopting or pursuing preferences and aspirations based on the influence of others rather than our intrinsic motivations), morphing into a manipulative force that feeds ... See more

Social media is a mimetic machine. What we typically call ‘social media’ is really social mediation – the mediation of desires. All day, every day, desires are being modelled to us through people we barely know. Mimetic desire is the hidden engine of these platforms.

In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.

if you consider yourself immune to its blandishments—if you think that as a consumer, everything you buy is the result of your own free will— take a look around your possessions. I am prepared to take a bet that a fair proportion of these, from the jeans you wear to the car you drive, were purchased for emotional as well as intellectual reasons; th

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