Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine

The manipulation of neural pathways

The weekly radio co-hosting preparation was swallowing too much time and compelling me to spend most of it on current affairs. I’m doing it only once a month now. Without the radio over-commitment, I limit current affairs consumption to basic knowledge of what’s going on. What’s going on is always depressing. And there’s nothing ordinary people can do about the corruption and ignorance level to which this country has sunk.

According to Max Fisher we can thank social media for this. Fisher has outlined how this happened in his The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world (Quercus, 2023).

Neuroscientist Polly Crocket discovered that social media activates a powerful set of neural pathways and that online norms of ever escalating outrage and conflict ‘transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self destruction.’ Fisher explains that this technology, ‘by training us to be more hostile, more tribal, and more prone to seeing out-group members as less than fully human, might be doing the same to society and politics as a whole.’ (p. 46)

Online platforms like Facebook mean that ‘billions of people’s moral compasses are potentially tilted toward tribalism and distrust. Whole societies are nudged toward conflict, polarization, and unreality – toward something like Trumpism.’ (ibid)

Tearing society’s fabric apart

The Facebook founder is making too much money from the feedback loops manipulating preferences towards extremes to pay more than lip service when governments try to make him rein in its algorithmic preferences. The head of the UN Fact Finding mission found that social media, especially Facebook, played a ‘determining role’ in the genocide in Myanmar and then Sri Lanka. The misinformation and lies spread by Facebook tore the fabric of those societies apart, just as we see it doing the same to other countries. In Sri Lanka when the government blocked Facebook the violence stopped.

Of course this was temporary – when the government, before reinstating it, asked Facebook to change its algorithms manipulating the population into crazed violence Zuckerberg said okay but did nothing.

An ecosystem of hatred

The author claims that long term Facebook users get ‘irony poisoned’ – a dulling of the senses and they become desensitised to things repugnant to normal social and moral standards. You Tube pulls users towards extreme views, stokes the fires of rage and racism, misogyny and far right propaganda. Fisher documents how things like German climate change scepticism was small and splintered until Facebook and You Tube.

To people like Peter Dutton whose campaign of misinformation just manipulated a majority of Australians to vote against giving our Indigenous peoples a say in parliamentary decisions that affect them it’s a godsend.

Canadian controversial psycholgist Jordan Peterson uses it to whip up teenage boys into a fever of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ – you’re not unhappy because you’re struggling with personal circumstances, you’re unhappy because of THEM, it’s their fault, not yours. Bolsonaro in Brazil used the same tactics of massively spreading lies and outrage to manipulate voters. One researcher Fisher interviewed spoke of ‘You Tube’s ecosystem of hate’.

Lives ruined and lost

Social media, Fisher claims, doesn’t reflect reality – it creates its own reality. It’s a machine ‘engineered to distort reality through the lens of tribal conflict and pull users toward extremes.’ (p. 298) The phenomena of Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US are examples of the detrimental effects of social media. And with Covid it did the same thing, in the same way. By April 2020 the overarching conspiracy – coronavirus is a plot by Them to control Us – was everywhere, thanks to Facebook and You Tube.

Their recommendation systems directed billions from legitimate governmental health information sites into anti-vaccine sites. Serial re-shares were far more likely to be misinformation. The algorithm, seeing the posts as viral fodder, boosted their reach artificially. Simply turning off this boost, would have curbed Covid-related misinformation by 38%, Facebook researchers found, but Zuckerberg refused. And 6,000 people a day (half of them American) were dying.

We remember what life was like before

Fisher spoke to many Facebook whistleblowers. Former Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein told the author that the platforms amplify harm and Facebook knows it but they won’t stop because if they changed the algorithms to be safer, people would spend less time on the site, they’d see fewer ads and Facebook would make less money.

‘If we only care about profit maximization, we will go rapidly into dystopia.’ (p. 31)

He added that we’re the last generation that can remember life before.

While reading this book I was reminded of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) the meticulously researched account of how big business and politics use global disasters for their own ends. Her book logically outlined the steps towards how that happened, for example, with the Iraqi war and the privatisation of Iraq’s economy. Her contention makes sense of what we’ve witnessed in the last decade and a half too: so many former liberal democracies largely descending into chaos except for a small group of elites – the mega-wealthy who can fly off away from the chaos in their private jets to their private islands or at least their private chateaux.

I remember Klein’s book being lucid and grim, how it logically unfolded in a calmly told horror story like a documentary film that made sense of all the current affairs of the previous twenty years, and which certainly makes sense of the last fifteen.

It’s this level of reflection I like to spend my time on, the big-picture stuff, not the small-detail, ephemeral outlining of everything that’s happened in the past week’s political events just so I can squeeze my few words in to a radio conversation. That’s why I’ll do it only once a month now – and free all that time up for joyful things like practising and appreciating the arts and for uplifting books like Susan Johnson’s Aphrodite’s Breath (Allen & Unwin, 2023). More about her beautiful second memoir next time.

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