Starving for Post-Post-Truth - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15164220
@wat0n,
anna wrote:One idea I've been thinking about is the gap between successful dissemination of misinformation and and then successful disconfirmation of it - this is what fake news exploits - the percent of people who will believe the disinfo and then not see or not believe the correction.

Right, but that gap has always been there too. You seem to be more comfortable with the idea of fake media development as rather some evolutionary process. While I tend to see it as almost a crisis of a sort. Also, today this gap appears to be more ‘technological’ than ‘temporal’. You may say it is the swiftness of dissemination, that makes it all so horrible. I’d rather say the nature and architecture of modern networks should be taken into account in the first place.
So here are my four horsemen of the post-truth apocalypse (they might be different for you):
1. Deepfake technologies (already mentioned). These might really make any fact-checking useless in the nearest future.
2. Possibility to control and change reference groups for each individual based on network analysis.
3. Possibility to control emotional reactions both at the group and individual levels.
4. Inertial effect at the individual level.

Let us say I am a media mogul, also holding 2-3 large networks. I have got a series of deepfakes I would like a certain group of people to believe in. I do realize those deepfake algos are still not quite robust. So I also use the networking algorithms. Is it possible for me to programmatically go through all the persons with certain attributes and then analyze their own networks of most read and trusted actors? Why not? If that is possible, then I can make some less ‘reliable’ nodes/actors in those users’ networks also less prominent/visible, while more ‘reliable’ might be made more visible. I can even exclude some ‘bad’ ones and include ‘good’ ones into their networks. That is how reference groups might be controlled. If that is not enough, I can add some anger, awe or joy along with my ‘facts’ to taste (see above). In the end, my users will be so convinced and involved, they will not even realize they need any alternative at all. So there will be no question of any gap whatsoever :(
Now, this may seem like a grim futurology. But I have some reasons to insist that this is not technically impossible.
#15164222
Ivan_R wrote:@wat0n,
Right, but that gap has always been there too. You seem to be more comfortable with the idea of fake media development as rather some evolutionary process.


No, I see it as having been with us for a long time but that the power of the past pales in comparison to what can be accomplished now through technology.

While I tend to see it as almost a crisis of a sort.


And I specifically said "How to get back to a post-truth truth is a good and vitally urgent question." Tomato, tomahto. I see us (along with @Wellsy) on the same page on this.

Also, today this gap appears to be more ‘technological’ than ‘temporal’. You may say it is the swiftness of dissemination, that makes it all so horrible. I’d rather say the nature and architecture of modern networks should be taken into account in the first place.


I don't disagree. I don't see why we can't hold both ideas as being parts of the same problem.

So here are my four horsemen of the post-truth apocalypse (they might be different for you):
1. Deepfake technologies (already mentioned). These might really make any fact-checking useless in the nearest future.
2. Possibility to control and change reference groups for each individual based on network analysis.
3. Possibility to control emotional reactions both at the group and individual levels.
4. Inertial effect at the individual level.

Let us say I am a media mogul, also holding 2-3 large networks. I have got a series of deepfakes I would like a certain group of people to believe in. I do realize those deepfake algos are still not quite robust. So I also use the networking algorithms. Is it possible for me to programmatically go through all the persons with certain attributes and then analyze their own networks of most read and trusted actors? Why not? If that is possible, then I can make some less ‘reliable’ nodes/actors in those users’ networks also less prominent/visible, while more ‘reliable’ might be made more visible. I can even exclude some ‘bad’ ones and include ‘good’ ones into their networks. That is how reference groups might be controlled. If that is not enough, I can add some anger, awe or joy along with my ‘facts’ to taste (see above). In the end, my users will be so convinced and involved, they will not even realize they need any alternative at all. So there will be no question of any gap whatsoever :(
Now, this may seem like a grim futurology. But I have some reasons to insist that this is not technically impossible.


I don't know what you see as our difference here. Did we not already go over Cambridge Analytica? You never specifically addressed it in your replies to me, but it was doing in 2016 what you're hypothesizing here. You brought up FB. Same. You're hypothesizing what is already fait accompli. Is not the focus of this conversation how to combat these capabilities, since we already have proof of what they can do?
#15164287
anna wrote:Is not the focus of this conversation how to combat these capabilities, since we already have proof of what they can do?

Sorry, it is probably me, who is now trying to change the focus a bit. Yes, earlier we might discuss what we could possibly do about that. Now I rather try to define some (possible) conditions, which might make any and all of our efforts futile.
So I'd be happy If you could convince me otherwise)

P.S. Yes, sorry, I forgot to answer about Cambridge Analytica. The example itself is more than relevant. Though it was not a revelation for me at that time, since I first knew of FB's malpractices in 2009 or so. My friend was a programmer in a large advertisement company and they tried to do something like that :(
What I try to say is there is no need to always get down to the individual level in such cases anyway.
#15164305
Ivan_R wrote:Sorry, it is probably me, who is now trying to change the focus a bit. Yes, earlier we might discuss what we could possibly do about that. Now I rather try to define some (possible) conditions, which might make any and all of our efforts futile.
So I'd be happy If you could convince me otherwise)

P.S. Yes, sorry, I forgot to answer about Cambridge Analytica. The example itself is more than relevant. Though it was not a revelation for me at that time, since I first knew of FB's malpractices in 2009 or so. My friend was a programmer in a large advertisement company and they tried to do something like that :(
What I try to say is there is no need to always get down to the individual level in such cases anyway.


It feels like we're stamping out a crop circle here. :)

If I'm understanding you, you'd like to move the focus from combatting fake news to understanding how it spreads through present-day digital networks made of of billions of individuals who are so interconnected on the internet that in your view their individuality is obscured by the size and scope of the network, and once that understanding is solidified, the likely outcome is a sort of inevitable networked nihilism?

Feel free to correct any of the above.
#15164315
anna wrote:If I'm understanding you, you'd like to move the focus from combatting fake news to understanding how it spreads through present-day digital networks made of of billions of individuals who are so interconnected on the internet that in your view their individuality is obscured by the size and scope of the network, and once that understanding is solidified, the likely outcome is a sort of inevitable networked nihilism?

Almost perfect, except the 'likely outcome'. Since it is hard to conceive how understanding being thus solidified might turn into some kind of nihilism proper :)
You cannot become a nihilist when you are left with nothing to negate... So if you mean some fatigue might give birth to a skeptical trend inside such entity, I'd doubt it.
And if by nihilism you mean some overwhelming desire to confront the reality outside the entity's boundaries, that would be not obvious too. Since there is no need for such entity to spend additional resources, when it has already been solidified enough :)

'Combatting fake news' might be a bit ambiguous. Since today we mostly see some opposing entities blaming each other in generating fake news. Something we have already mentioned as 'polarized politics and the ensuing tribalism'. So if our society is really becoming that 'relativistic', we should first find out if there is still some 'laboratory frame of reference', which would be truly independent of any of such large entities....
#15164318
Ivan_R wrote:Almost perfect, except the 'likely outcome'. Since it is hard to conceive how understanding being thus solidified might turn into some kind of nihilism proper :)
You cannot become a nihilist when you are left with nothing to negate... So if you mean some fatigue might give birth to a skeptical trend inside such entity, I'd doubt it.
And if by nihilism you mean some overwhelming desire to confront the reality outside the entity's boundaries, that would be not obvious too. Since there is no need for such entity to spend additional resources, when it has already been solidified enough :)


I'd explore "fatigue might give birth to a skeptical trend inside such entity." As in, when no one knows what they're being fed is true or false, they may eventually feel so helpless as to cease caring. Their individual unique survival mechanism may kick in and they will either fight/rebel or cease caring/accept a fate they're unwilling or unable to change. This is human nature so yes, I come back to the individual.

'Combatting fake news' might be a bit ambiguous. Since today we mostly see some opposing entities blaming each other in generating fake news. Something we have already mentioned as 'polarized politics and the ensuing tribalism'. So if our society is really becoming that 'relativistic', we should first find out if there is still some 'laboratory frame of reference', which would be truly independent of any of such large entities....


Yeah, it is, it's just a basic terminology framework, I'm sure there's a better way to drill it down. Again though, it's in our nature to be tribal, but online tribalism takes it to a new and different place. That 'laboratory frame of reference' would be objective truth, which is not a new argument at all...
#15164420
anna wrote:This is human nature so yes, I come back to the individual.

Being humans we all remain at this level, I believe. That is, we always perceive ourselves as being individuals. It is our human nature.
The question is whether we are always perceived as such by the society and its… (modern) infrastructural elements? This conflict between the individual and collective has always been acute, especially in totalitarian systems. Now it is just being revitalized at a new level. What is primary? What do you call individuality and/or personality?
Do you remember how it all started? Some people began to notice the advertisement they saw in their browsers was somehow related to what they wrote in their letters. So they asked, if that meant their letters were being read. The answer was: “But of course, we cannot read your letters, we cannot access any personal data whatsoever. That is illegal! Our algos do that, but all those data are depersonalized. However, that does not mean we cannot show you some personalized advertisement!”
We do not know/care who you personally are, but still we can make the data personalized for you. That was a paradoxical paradigm even Cambridge Analytica tried to adhere to. It is not a big step to another one: “We do not know who you are, but still can modify your personality”. Again, why not? Can we be sure the amount of personalized data (of any sort) we receive right now is not large enough to make us act similarly? How similar are we already? Are two snowflakes individual or not? Who cares. Will we be happy with the ‘identity of indiscernibles’?

anna wrote:Again though, it's in our nature to be tribal, but online tribalism takes it to a new and different place. That 'laboratory frame of reference' would be objective truth, which is not a new argument at all...

I do not agree. It may be a new argument, since ‘online tribalism takes it to a new and different place’. I chose that terminology from physics, because I see it as some expansion of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. If not only our languages, but also our networks determine what we think, there cannot be any laboratory frame of reference at all. Any question concerning the ‘objective truth’ would be absurd. The networks are much more rigid and 'closed' than our languages.
#15164426
Ivan_R wrote:Being humans we all remain at this level, I believe. That is, we always perceive ourselves as being individuals. It is our human nature.
The question is whether we are always perceived as such by the society and its… (modern) infrastructural elements? This conflict between the individual and collective has always been acute, especially in totalitarian systems. Now it is just being revitalized at a new level. What is primary? What do you call individuality and/or personality?
Do you remember how it all started? Some people began to notice the advertisement they saw in their browsers was somehow related to what they wrote in their letters. So they asked, if that meant their letters were being read. The answer was: “But of course, we cannot read your letters, we cannot access any personal data whatsoever. That is illegal! Our algos do that, but all those data are depersonalized. However, that does not mean we cannot show you some personalized advertisement!”
We do not know/care who you personally are, but still we can make the data personalized for you. That was a paradoxical paradigm even Cambridge Analytica tried to adhere to. It is not a big step to another one: “We do not know who you are, but still can modify your personality”. Again, why not? Can we be sure the amount of personalized data (of any sort) we receive right now is not large enough to make us act similarly? How similar are we already? Are two snowflakes individual or not? Who cares. Will we be happy with the ‘identity of indiscernibles’?


I do not agree. It may be a new argument, since ‘online tribalism takes it to a new and different place’. I chose that terminology from physics, because I see it as some expansion of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. If not only our languages, but also our networks determine what we think, there cannot be any laboratory frame of reference at all. Any question concerning the ‘objective truth’ would be absurd. The networks are much more rigid and 'closed' than our languages.


I think you hit a very important truth with this Ivan_R.

it is a big impersonal shitty system that then tells you, "We are not really personally involved or have a stake in this but your uniqueness can be marketed to those willing to give us money for the most minute bits of subjective and objective information on you as an individual and as a member of a larger group, organization or society. Therefore we are commodifying diversity because it is the last frontier...to conquer. If we commodify your personal and most intimate details and we can influence it without being in any way responsible for your responses to those interferences? We have more power. And power and economic might go hand in hand in this system.

People should limit severely how much information is allowed to be exchanged about them personally in every non-personal platform for communication and selling information online.

Got to limit big Brother for sure. But more than that? Got to preserve the relationship with other humans who do care about us on personal levels and in which we are interacting and who are not MACHINES.

When machines become as important or more important to us as other humans? It is downhill for us as creatures of the natural world. We become alienated enough from ourselves to wind up doing crazy things. Like shooting total strangers for no reasons that are valid, and unable to feel comfortable with other human beings like us and prefer the company of machines, computers, and inanimate things. Those inanimate devices that try to emulate a human relationship but that are far less difficult to navigate than real people are.
#15164437
Ivan_R wrote:Being humans we all remain at this level, I believe. That is, we always perceive ourselves as being individuals. It is our human nature.


Because that is what we are.

The question is whether we are always perceived as such by the society and its… (modern) infrastructural elements? This conflict between the individual and collective has always been acute, especially in totalitarian systems. Now it is just being revitalized at a new level. What is primary?


At the macro/network level you have political regimes seeing/portraying/treating individuals as commodities, less than human, worth nothing, expendable. Tragic, but it has always been and always will be. At the individual level you have sociopaths/psychopaths/malignant narcissists doing the same, also tragic, also inevitably a component of human nature.

What do you call individuality and/or personality?


What do you mean, what do you call them? Do you mean how do I define them?

Do you remember how it all started?


Yes I do.

How similar are we already? Are two snowflakes individual or not? Who cares. Will we be happy with the ‘identity of indiscernibles’?


Yes, two snowflakes are individual, and someone cares, I can assure you. :) There are a number of qualitative human attributes that humans share, for example, human response to fear is instinctive, the process beginning without conscious prompting in the amygdala, but there are of course many variations to the degree in which people genetically, or via training, respond to that initial processing. Interestingly MRI scans have shown that self-described conservatives have larger amygdalas. So what's the correlation? I don't know. Does having a larger amygdala mean you're more likely to lean conservative, or do conservative fears have an effect on the size of the amygdala? Either way, it doesn't surprise me since one of the components of a right-wing authoritarian personality is a fear of the new, the other, the radical, the looming threat of whatever.

Have you ever seen one of those photographs by Spencer Tunick where he assembles dozens or hundreds of volunteers to pose for mass nude photos? I don't know if my consistent mental response to them is common or not, but to me, those photos completely dehumanize their subjects. Those photos are the first thing I thought of when I read your words "identity of indiscernibles." They are art, artistic statements, and perhaps one aspect of art is to make the viewer uncomfortable. Not because they're nude, but because those photos remind me how utterly insignificant the human is in the scale of the universe. It's unsettling, to have the tree of one's grandiose ideas of human accomplishment shaken a bit.

I do not agree. It may be a new argument, since ‘online tribalism takes it to a new and different place’.


But is not the new version still a difference in degree, not kind?

I chose that terminology from physics, because I see it as some expansion of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. If not only our languages, but also our networks determine what we think, there cannot be any laboratory frame of reference at all. Any question concerning the ‘objective truth’ would be absurd. The networks are much more rigid and 'closed' than our languages.


"If" is a big tent. Remember, it's a hypothesis, and it may not "determine," it may influence. Huge area in between those two places.
#15165173
Tainari88 wrote:Got to limit big Brother for sure. But more than that? Got to preserve the relationship with other humans who do care about us on personal levels and in which we are interacting and who are not MACHINES.

anna wrote:But is not the new version still a difference in degree, not kind?

I am just trying to explore some possible limits of what might happen next. We might think we either are still standing on a firm ground, or at least might get back to it whenever we like. Our common sense tells us there are no insurmountable problems. We should just keep being sane, critical, skeptical, etc. We should just treat other humans as humans, not machines, turn off our devices, go out to see our friends and relatives and so on.
There is a drawback here. Yes, we can turn off our devices and get out of any possible networks, though we cannot be sure all the others still can do the same. Most of us today can imagine this only in some very exotic conditions of extreme downshifting. So if I am totally ‘deplatformed’, while all the others stay where they are, there is no difference for me. I remain in the same continuum with all those values, facts, narratives, which might still be determined through the same network(s).

Our reference groups have always ‘meant the world for us’. Or as Marx said: ‘The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations’. What can we expect when this ‘ensemble’ becomes ‘reified’ in networks (@Wellsy)? When it becomes something visible and palpable? When someone can get hold of it entirely? If he can control and 'conduct' this ‘ensemble’, then he is able to change this ‘reality’. It is just inevitable. So yes (@anna), I tend to maintain it is rather a new ‘kind’, then a ‘difference in degree’.
Our networks (ex reference groups) already determine too much in our lives. Very soon, ‘deplatforming’ might become a much more cruel punishment, than expelling from the polis was for the ancient Greeks. If you have some resources, you will have to build a network of your own (Trump?). If not….

anna wrote:Have you ever seen one of those photographs by Spencer Tunick where he assembles dozens or hundreds of volunteers to pose for mass nude photos? I don't know if my consistent mental response to them is common or not, but to me, those photos completely dehumanize their subjects.

Yes, I have seen them. I felt just the same. For me it is a great illustration of what I described as the Marxian ensemble being conducted (just above). Especially that gathering in the Stadschouwburg theatre. There should probably be a child, who, as in that tale of the naked king, might say: “You may still think of yourselves as bold individuals, but now you are nothing but a bunch of completely naked people… leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
Do not you find the situation when people are compelled to give their informed consent, which might potentially strip them of any privacy, much more dehumanizing than that one?

anna wrote:What do you mean, what do you call them? Do you mean how do I define them?

I mean, what is that thing you refer to as individuality and/or personality? Is it more like a soul? Or mind, consciousness, ‘qualia’, which even the analytical thinkers believe to be completely private (I think they may be wrong)?
#15165622
Ivan_R wrote:I am just trying to explore some possible limits of what might happen next. We might think we either are still standing on a firm ground, or at least might get back to it whenever we like. Our common sense tells us there are no insurmountable problems. We should just keep being sane, critical, skeptical, etc. We should just treat other humans as humans, not machines, turn off our devices, go out to see our friends and relatives and so on.
There is a drawback here. Yes, we can turn off our devices and get out of any possible networks, though we cannot be sure all the others still can do the same. Most of us today can imagine this only in some very exotic conditions of extreme downshifting. So if I am totally ‘deplatformed’, while all the others stay where they are, there is no difference for me. I remain in the same continuum with all those values, facts, narratives, which might still be determined through the same network(s).

Our reference groups have always ‘meant the world for us’. Or as Marx said: ‘The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations’. What can we expect when this ‘ensemble’ becomes ‘reified’ in networks (@Wellsy)? When it becomes something visible and palpable? When someone can get hold of it entirely? If he can control and 'conduct' this ‘ensemble’, then he is able to change this ‘reality’. It is just inevitable. So yes (@anna), I tend to maintain it is rather a new ‘kind’, then a ‘difference in degree’.
Our networks (ex reference groups) already determine too much in our lives. Very soon, ‘deplatforming’ might become a much more cruel punishment, than expelling from the polis was for the ancient Greeks. If you have some resources, you will have to build a network of your own (Trump?). If not….

Indeed there is skepticism of any ability to escape at this point.
http://rickroderick.org/108-philosophy-and-post-modern-culture-1990/
But in a culture so overloaded, where we already suspect – if we don’t know – that it’s goal is psychoanalysis in reverse. To make the parts of us that think into ones that don’t. To just react, follow, or replicate. One thing that we can do, is tune out. So, many of us do that in one form or another. We take the culture and simply try to tune out as much of it as we can. But… there is a flaw in the strategy. And that’s that no culture ever was so pervasive. Even this word may be bothering you. There was a time when culture meant going to the things created by us folks, as opposed to nature. Where is nature now? There isn’t one. Everything has been inculturated. The most beautiful natural scenes there are, are the filmed ones that are created through fractogeometry at IBM.

However, my view is that one doesn't ever try to escape the conditions but rather changes the conditions. If man's being is determined by social relations, then man indirectly determines himself by changing those social relations. Which doesn't require being beyond influences but rather being critically aware of them.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
Marx's second argument against Kantian morality is that its focus on the free will belies the extent to which the will is itself determined by material conditions and material interests. The abstraction of the “free will” is illegitimate according to Marx because it attempts to prize apart the intellectual life of individuals from their economic, social, and historical context. A person with a will that is “wholly independent of foreign causes determining it,” to adopt Kant's phrase, simply does not exist in reality, and therefore such a subject makes a rather poor starting point for moral theory. (Later, in 1853, Marx writes, there critiquing Hegel, “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself”74!)

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
When a subject is faced with a conflict of motives (e.g., needing to get out of bed but still wanting to rest), the subject will voluntarily introduce an artificial stimulus which they use to resolve the conflict (an alarm clock or telling themselves “I will get up on the count of 3, ...”).

These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.

“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.

https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf
Critical voice is the capacity of a person living “inside” a society to form views available from a position “outside” that society:

“... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society.” (Sen 2002a, p. 476-77.)

Critical agency is thus “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.” The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be “critical voice.” This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But “critical voice” does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society. Critical voice is both instrumental, in that it is needed in order to sustain the other elements of well-being, and constitutive, in that only the person with critical voice is truly free.

This is to emphasize the point that we change the conditions but one must be cognizant of them and develop an alternative.
The freedom not being liberal choice between many options within set confines but to change the very basis in which one makes such decisions.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm
Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself
...
This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against “formal” freedom are about, therein resides their “rational kernel” which is worth saving today: when he emphasizes that there is no “pure” democracy, that we should always ask who does a freedom under consideration serve, which is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of the TRUE radical choice. This is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice WITHIN the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s point is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice — when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: “Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?”


And to clarify further on that quote of Marx, the point is a criticism against the abstract universals which identifies that which is common to every individual case rather than properly understanding that individuals aren't identical in their development but differ precisely in their experiences in relation to social practices. It is foolish to think that the person of a capitalist class position is going to grow up typically like that of a poor urban worker.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.

In fact, Marx identifies the concrete universal of humans on the basis of their labor and activity as the cause of their 'social being'. So that what one instead identifies is something particular which underpins all other particulars. Within social relations there isn't a homogenous society but one of a division of labor where there is one sidedness to people's activity.

However, the entire life of many people isn't synonymous with the internet. The internet doesn't stand independent of our reality although it does have a reciprocal influence upon it. Which is clear enough when kids bully others via snapchat and such, it has offline consequences. To which the control of something like facebook in how it organizes its space is the same sort of influence and control that comes into say the design of supermarkets and so on in order to induce consumption/spending.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer
It is again that we are subject to influences from things which are not of our own choosing as we do not have a substantial say in the direction of our environment and thus our lives, if man dictates his actions largely through his environment, then yes there is great influence from those who set the qualities of the environment. At the same time though we aren't necessarily synonymous with Behaviorist conditioning that we are purely influenced by the environment and do not in fact cultivate our commitments and self and make decisions. We in fact also alter the environment in even small ways to redirect ourselves and make decisions.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/self-control.htm
As his experiments have shown, human behavior that does not have a specific intention is subject to the power of the situation. Every thing requires some kind of action, elicits, excites, actualizes some kind of reaction. The typical behavior of a person waiting in an empty room with nothing to do is characterized mainly by the fact that he is at the mercy of the environment. Intention is also based on creating an action in response to a direct need of things or, as Lewin says, coming out of the surrounding field. The intention to mail the letter creates a situation in which the first mailbox acquires the capability of determining our behavior, but in addition, with intention, an essential change in the person’s behavior occurs. The person, using the power of things or stimuli, controls his own behavior through them, grouping them, putting them together, sorting them. In other words, the great uniqueness of the will consists of man having no power over his own behavior other than the power that things have over his behavior. But man subjects to himself the power of things over behavior, makes them serve his own purposes and controls that power as he wants. He changes the environment with his external activity and in this way affects his own behavior, subjecting it to his own authority.

That in Lewin’s experiments we are actually speaking of such control of oneself through stimuli is easy to see from his example. The subject is asked to wait for a long time and to no purpose in an empty room. She vacillates – to leave or to continue waiting, a conflict of motives occurs. She looks at her watch; this only reinforces one of the motives, specifically, it is time to go, it is already late. Until now the subject was exclusively at the mercy of the motives, but now she begins to control her own behavior. The watch instantly constituted a stimulus that acquires the significance of an auxiliary motive. The subject decides “When the hands of the watch reach a certain position, I will get up and leave.” Consequently, she closes a conditioned connection between the position of the hands and her leaving; she decides to leave through the hands of the watch and she acts in response to external stimuli, in other words, she introduces an auxiliary motive similar to the dice or the count “one, two, three” for getting up. In this example, it is very easy to see how a change in the functional role of the stimulus, its conversion to an auxiliary motive, occurs.

I state this to push back on any tendency some might have of reading the overwhelming influence that it leaves no room for self-determination of an individual although I would emphasize that the individual does have limited strength over significant influence from the design of their environment. Hence the stupidity of those who simply say eat healthier to poor people who get obese eating junk food with no consideration to how their time and effort gets utterly depleted on other things. Unconcerned with the conditions which best support people's health and needs against those who profit, they think of the free will as something absolutely free, metaphyiscal.

The scary influence of the internet is the manner in which people do end up having so little of a life and meaningful relations offline that they can be quite subsumed by the online spaces they participate in. So I do share that there is concerning influence but just trying to be a bit contrarian.

Yes, I have seen them. I felt just the same. For me it is a great illustration of what I described as the Marxian ensemble being conducted (just above). Especially that gathering in the Stadschouwburg theatre. There should probably be a child, who, as in that tale of the naked king, might say: “You may still think of yourselves as bold individuals, but now you are nothing but a bunch of completely naked people… leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
Do not you find the situation when people are compelled to give their informed consent, which might potentially strip them of any privacy, much more dehumanizing than that one?

I take it that what @anna describes is also characteristic of the sort of dehumanization which isn't necessarily something I see inherent from the position f GOd's eye/the universe looking down at our insignificant selves. Rather I can often see it in terms of the bureaucraticpigeonholing of people such that they are objects of qualities rather than people.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/On%20Political%20Representation.pdf
It is by acting in the world that an individual makes themself into a personality and in just the same way, by choosing and mandating representatives, a group transforms themself from a collection of individuals into a subject, an actor on the stage of history. There is no implication in this that internal differences are dissolved, overridden or ignored, but they are transcended.

So we have two concepts here of what constitutes a person and what constitutes a representative. On the one hand, a person is seen as someone with a certain gender, age, education, experience, nationality, etc., etc., and on the other, a person is someone who pursues certain purposes, has commitments, a life. The former is the object of surveys of voter preferences, the passive object of political policy and action. The latter is the active subject, who pursues ends collaboratively with others and changes the world.

Same thing happens with work where there is no individuality in the market other than perhaps how one tries to build their identity based on what they consume. Rather one's labor is part of a real quality of abstract labor. Ones work is part of not a particular kind of work but in terms of hours and production and on this basis is one valued.
Tangential somewhat but is about how life becomes subject to this abstract general process rather than things serving human ends. We experience ourselves as more something to serve the process of production itself.
Which has become applied to the online space, does it reflect something inherent to the online space or is it how the online space has been shaped by the same relations as offline. Making people's data into a product.
People are often seen as objects of manipulation rather than persons with their own ends.
I mean, what is that thing you refer to as individuality and/or personality? Is it more like a soul? Or mind, consciousness, ‘qualia’, which even the analytical thinkers believe to be completely private (I think they may be wrong)?

Indeed, they are quite wrong because some don't understand how qualia while personally experienced is socially developed or not solely confined to one's mind but in relation to an objective world.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm
According to Vygotsky, Piaget fails to see the transition from “egocentric speech” (when a child talks aloud to him/herself while alone) to “inner speech”. Piaget believes that egocentric speech simply “fades away” as the child becomes less egocentric and more socialised. Vygotsky on the other hand, hypothesises that egocentric speech turns into inner speech; that it does not fade away but “goes underground”. The analogy with learning to count and add up is very convincing.

In contradiction to Piaget’s conception of development as socialisation, Vygotsky says:

“The earliest speech of the child is ... essentially social. ... At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric and communicative speech ... Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions ... Egocentric speech, splintered off from general social speech, in time leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking. ... the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]

Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality!

http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html
Marx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.

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