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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3160 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 28, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do you think that tik tok's particularly strong boosting of local content, especially compared with other social media platforms, is possibly tied to a desire by the platform to deepen partisan and regional divides across the US?

There is also something dark in the way the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire in the most degrading way. For example I'm socially anxious and insecure about my masculinity so my feed was overrun with hypermasculine extremely affable men to a ridiculous degree. I have never had that experience with any other social media platform. I haven't used the app in over a year but there was something about it that always struck me as more toxic than any other. It is almost like the mirror of Erised, the magic device that shows us our deepest desires but never gives them to us. I found it completely maddening.

Part of it is a content moderation solution. At one point I remember reading that they assessed if a person was likely to be bullied and if so they limited their reach to their home country to cut back on complaints.

I will occasionally get those, “Make women desire you; stop being so nice,” ads on YouTube, delivered by an attractive-but-not-unreasonably-attractive woman with exaggerated gestures and expressions offering to tell you “the secret” to getting girls. I am generally pretty resistant to advertising. I will usually click the “skip ad” button, but in a world of finely-tuned manipulative advertising, where every ad for me is like this, could this be the key to emptying my bank account?

If you get the uBlock Origin extension, you'll never see ads of any kind on YouTube.

Interesting observation but I'm somewhat not convinced. For me as an example it didn't feed me a string of endless redheads with freckles and nice boobs - to - waist - to - hips ratios.

Well, let me say first that I have read the response by @Primaprimaprima and found it very entertaining. My own response would be that your allusion to that Harry Potter mirror was evocative for me. I have similar suspicions about all the platforms that currently ape TikTok's manner of presenting these what I will call microvideos (I despise what I feel is the wildly inaccurate term content to describe them).

I have friends (male) who launch private, anonymous accounts (equivalent to a reddit throwaway) expressly for the purpose of following whatever fetish artist or bikini model charges their battery. These aren't horny teenagers, either, I mean adult men. They don't do it to follow muscle cars or sports teams, however, thiugh that undoubtedly has to do with shame--no one's going to care if they have a few corvette fan club accounts in their follow list.

Do you have, in your who-you-are-following, a few GNC or similar accounts? Obviously we're all being tracked, both on-

and off-platforms, in various ways. I sometimes wonder of my friends' wormhole(s) of sexy elves or furry fandom (I just made that up; I don't actually know what the accounts are) spiral them further and further into planes of lasciviousness, or plush mink, or whatever.

I deleted my Instagram app some time ago but before I did so I got a lot of unsolicited geeky sci- fi stuff in my feed, which makes sense based on my (random) clicks.

the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire

I think this is too hasty of a claim to make. There are several problems that need to be explored here.

First: An obvious point, but one that bears repeating. TikTok cannot show you what you desire in its actuality, in the sense that it cannot manifest physical objects or states of affairs in reality; it can only show you representations of what you desire, in the form of videos. This allows us to inquire about the gap between the representation and the thing purportedly being represented. I claim that this gap is always irreducible, and thus problematizes any straightforward notion of TikTok showing you "exactly" what you desire.

It is easy to find examples of desires that elude direct representation. Christians have historically had a difficult time explaining exactly what the experience of Paradiso is supposed to be like, and communists have similarly had difficulty explaining how a true communist society would function, except through the via negativa: Heaven is not the state of earthly sin, communism is not the alienation of capitalism, and so forth. Plainly, if words and images alone are incapable of capturing these hypothetical states of affairs, then the combination of words and images in the form of video contributes nothing to the problem of their representation. But we need not confine ourselves to such rarefied examples; even in the most concrete and earthly desires, problems arise. Suppose you have a desire to eat steak. Suppose you are shown a TikTok video of a steak sizzling in a pan. This causes you to think: I desire to eat steak; I was shown an image of steak; thus TikTok has shown me what I desire; where's the problem? But this is based on a misrecognition of your own desire, as a simple thought experiment shows.

When you imagine eating a steak, you must always imagine that you are eating it in a particular concrete environment, in a particular location in spacetime, in a particular relationship with the other objects and people in your surroundings. You will certainly never imagine eating the steak in a pure black void, you and the steak alone in the universe; such a void would be bizarre and disquieting, and would certainly ruin the experience of the meal. Thus you do not have a pure and simple desire for "steak" as such, but rather you desire steak only insofar as it is embedded in the proper relational network. A video of a steak being cooked by a random person you don't know leaves obscure the fact that you don't desire to share a meal with just anyone; perhaps there are times where you desire to eat alone, but there are also times where you desire to eat with friends and family, people you have meaningful relationships with, in a comfortable and familiar environment. A random video can never capture the specificity of your particular relationships, of the social meanings that you attach to the act of dining with others, because it will always depict someone else who is not you.

We can imagine a magic version of TikTok that always displays your own private fantasy: we can imagine that it literally depicts you and your friends, sharing a meal, laughing and having a good time, etc. But even here, the gap between the representation and the reality of your desire can never be reduced to nothing. Consider the possibility that one of your friends (depicted in the magic video) is actually not your friend, but is instead your secret enemy, and while he is with you, he is constantly struggling to prevent himself from flying into a violent rage, even though on the surface he maintains a perfect act of being friendly and amicable. You desire to have a guarantee that this possibility can never come to pass, but how could such a guarantee ever be represented? Even if text were to appear on the video stating "this is the voice of God, and I guarantee that all the people assembled here genuinely love you, and none of them mean you harm", it would always be an open question whether that declaration were actually veridical or not. Because there can be no direct representation of the contents of consciousness of another conscious entity, your desire can never be fully sated, and it never reaches an end to its questioning.

We can easily apply this type of relational analysis to other examples. You desire beautiful women, TikTok shows you a beautiful woman who is just your type, thus it has reflected your desire, right? But don't you desire more than just the image of a woman? Don't you desire to have an authentic relationship with her, with all the vicissitudes that an actual relationship entails? All the ups and downs, the happy moments, the painful moments, even the long stretches of boredom where nothing much happens, all that is essential to an actual relationship as opposed to the falsified image of one? Because of the necessary extension of such a relationship in time, because of the necessity of the unfolding of the process itself (as opposed to the mere end result, the "final" image of happiness), it's the sort of thing that could not even be represented in a feature film, let alone a 10 second short.

Second: Continuing with the theme of the misrecognition of one's desire. Because the algorithm is based on your own volitional act of clicking on videos, your own self-reported desire, the algorithm reflects what you think your desire is, but this is frequently quite different from what your desire is in actuality. I doubt you have any serious desire for masculinity qua masculinity for example; I doubt you have made a genuine assessment that being masculine is virtuous as such. More than likely you only desire it on instrumental grounds because you believe it makes you more desirable to women, or that it accords you more social status. Imagine if tomorrow everyone around you held the opposite opinion; imagine that women found social anxiety to be attractive, and your colleagues at work started apportioning the most social status to those who were the most socially anxious. I imagine that you would abandon your desire for masculinity in a heartbeat, and you would instead become fixated on finding ways to make yourself appear more socially anxious.

Thus your "deepest desire" reveals itself to be quite fragile, and we should instead seek the reality of your desire elsewhere. The point, of course, is not to arrive at your true and final desire, beyond which there is nothing left that can deceive us; the point rather is that this self-movement and self-sublation is the nature of desire itself. The tendency of the algorithm to produce "gravitational attractors" based on your own self-reports arrests the movement of desire and falsifies it.

Third: Can TikTok represent the self-contradictory nature of desire? Desire never takes a simple and direct path to its object, flying straight as Cupid's arrow. Desire is always mutilated; it is always shattered from the start, at odds with itself.

Your issues with masculinity are not issues of knowledge or capability. If you're posting here, you're probably of above average intelligence and above average financial means, and you could enact this transformation in yourself if you really wanted to. I have personally seen men of meager means make quite dramatic personality shifts. You already know what you would have to do and how you would have to act in order to make yourself more outgoing. The fact that you haven't done so already indicates a certain trepidation on your part. You desire one thing, but also its opposite. Such is the nature of desire.

I am not in principle opposed to the idea of the direct representation of contradiction in audiovisual form. But, I don't believe that TikTok in its current form is designed with such possibilities in mind; it is predicated on the idea that you have one pure and simple desire, and that accessing the truth of this desire poses no special problems.

It is almost like the mirror of Erised, the magic device that shows us our deepest desires but never gives them to us.

It does no such thing. You simply fell prey to an illusion.

Ultimately, you're just not giving yourself enough credit. TikTok did not reflect the truth of your desire. It simply took one small and insignificant part of it, a part that is meaningless when it is deprived of its relationship to the whole, and drew a caricature of it, magnifying it to comic proportions. Your desire cannot be mastered by a series of 10 second videos. It is something far greater than that. Once you start to understand the nature of your own desire, you begin to chip away at the illusion of the algorithm's power.

Hmm, thank you for your interesting response to my post. I may be misinterpreting your conclusions and theories but I feel like we really aren't as much in disagreement as you are implying, maybe I was too vague or worded things too hastily in my original post.

Responding to your first point: I think you're actually illustrating the frustration that I found with tiktok and that I was trying to illustrate with the Mirror of Erised comparison. The Mirror in the book shows just a facsimile of our deepest desire- it is a sort of masturbatory object that just displays an image on a surface of ourselves owning or doing what we desire. We could imagine an actual Mirror of Erised app that, say, records our faces and bodies and then AI generates videos of us doing whatever we want- battling foes in Ancient Rome, sleeping with any celebrity, whatever- but this would actually be even a step removed from the reality of seeing just a video of someone doing or being what we want of their own volition, because we as independent actors imagine ourselves in relation to whatever we're viewing. Basically, if I see a hypermasculine friendly guy in a video, I am also seeing the shadow of the qualities that I lack projected onto the subject. If I was shown a video of an AI version of myself acting this way, it would probably be less maddening because it's so fantastical that I wouldn't be seeing my own lack in this video but rather either enjoy seeing a fantasy version of myself for a moment, or just dismiss it outright as silly.

I think I'm rambling and losing the plot here so let me go back- Yes, you're correct that there is always a distance between what tiktok shows us and what we desire. I think this is also part of the irony that Rowling was trying to elucidate by inventing the Mirror of Erised.

Point two: Yes, my desires are shaped by what I think they will give me. I think I could be happier and more popular if I was friendlier and more masculine so I seek to become more masculine and friendly, because those are traits that I believe I lack.

The tendency of the algorithm to produce "gravitational attractors" based on your own self-reports arrests the movement of desire and falsifies it.

I don't see that as evident... The second level desires I have (to become more masculine and be friendlier) are still strong enough for me to be hung up on it, I'm not gullible enough to waste time on some literal clickbait that's like "This one weird trick to masculinity will get you a thousand new friends in 50 seconds or less" but I am gullible enough to waste hours scrolling through feeds of masculine affable men to try and glean some tips from them or otherwise, in my monkey brain, try to glean some kind of affect from. It is showing me the second layer of what I want because I think that's the level that tik tok can provide me with, because I don't think it can provide me with the underlying actuality of being happier and having more friends as such. Thus, the layer of abstraction from being able to get anything out of the platform as I tried to allude to when I framed tik tok as "maddening" in my original post.

Point three: I actually am and have taken many steps to correct the things that I'm trying to improve in myself, including masculinity and friendliness. It's not something that can be fixed overnight and I'm likely to struggle with it for years and years, just like I've struggled with overeating and low self esteem. Of course my nature is to be unmasculine, unfriendly, eat tons of food and hate myself, but I have to resist all of these urges every day. I am proud of the progress I've made in all these areas. I don't know if watching the content I was fed on tiktok was a positive path to self improvement or a toxic mirror that felt like a needle at the side of my insecurities. In a way it was both, perhaps.

Interesting, good post.

with all the vicissitudes that an actual relationship entails? All the ups and downs, the happy moments, the painful moments, even the long stretches of boredom where nothing much happens, all that is essential to an actual relationship as opposed to the falsified image of one?

Really? Wouldn't relationships be better if they lacked painful moments? Imagine an omnipotent goes all out and makes you a soulmate. Every gene, every memory, every quirk of personality and every atom is specifically designed to maximize the happy moments in the relationship and prevent unhappy moments. That is strictly superior to standard relationships. On a purely definitional level, this must be true. It's not achievable by us but it's still an ideal.

I don't really have a full answer right now. This sounds quite hellish to me:

an omnipotent goes all out and makes you a soulmate. Every gene, every memory, every quirk of personality and every atom is specifically designed to maximize the happy moments in the relationship and prevent unhappy moments

but I'm not prepared to give an argument for why that should be the case, so I'll have to just let it stand as an assertion of preference.

This piece by Orwell is a good starting point. Utopia always gets boring after a while.

There is also something dark in the way the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire in the most degrading way. For example I'm socially anxious and insecure about my masculinity so my feed was overrun with hypermasculine extremely affable men to a ridiculous degree

I've never heard this about TikTok, but that's probably because I've stayed far away from it. I know close to nothing about TikTok. But I'm wondering, what is the mechanism/algorithm by which they tailor this content for you and give it to you? Is it that you're looking up those videos of hypermasculine content, and then they give you more of it?

I've deleted and re-downloaded the app a handful of times and every time I do I get tons of local content and videos that seem to highlight things people are insecure about- for example, one video I saw was something like "my [rich] mom's insane skincare collection," (playing on people's class anxieties and appearance anxieties,) videos of really hot local people with lots of followers (playing on people's social anxieties), I can imagine other people get tons of social justice related type content that plays on people's anxieties around race and such. It just seems to boost content that shows what people find themselves lacking. It's kind of Girardian in how it shows memetic desire of others in one platform. So it seems like it's already designed to figure out what you want and then give you a simulacra of that thing.

Of course I'm not blameless as I chose to follow and interact with the accounts that show me what I want, but I suspect most people would be even worse at resisting the bait than I was.

I do not know much about TikTok specifically, but every social media has a large section of content aimed at highlighting the objects of people's insecurities. I think that insecurity's compulsiveness mixed with TikTok's uniquely high content turnover rate which also influences the algorithm's recommendations in totality(the watchtime itself is a metric of engagement), gives rise to the amount.

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