Algorithmic Evolution
What does a world look like in which most people get most of their information about current events from the Youtube or TikTok algorithm? In some sense, more democratic—anyone can go viral. But, while I’ll be the first one to hate on the mainstream media, its sheer lack of bandwidth—the fact that it must select and gatekeep from pure material necessity according to that which it thinks is..important, useful, conducive, etc. means that it necessarily acted as a bottleneck against the sheer tide of information. If you don’t have that in your brain, it looks schizophrenic. We don’t have it at the societal level.
I often think that the key to understanding a capitalist economy is understanding that it is essentially natural selection applied to capital. Here, it is capital that is under immense duress at a granular level, at the constant threat of complete elimination—pure finance suffers from flash crashes, to say nothing of real businesses. The capital being up against the wall is where the energy comes from, as what emerges is inevitably honed in the sharpest competition the market—nature—saw fit to provide.
A business honed in such an environment had evolutionary pressure applied to it via one dimension—profitability. I assert that business is the one institution in society that is reviled in spite of its success in achieving its goals, not because of its failure to do so. It is no wonder why business thrives while government falters, it simply has no choice.
We are moving to a new environment. TikTok, in regards to the sheer mimetic throughput and fitness, is to NYT as Africanized bees are to American bumblebees.
There are two evolutionary filters through which these businesses, and their memes (which are essentially organs of the businesses themselves) operate. There is the typical market pressure of profitability. This we are used to. Then there is the selection of ideas. As of now, ideas or memes appear to be largely selected for some measure of engagement. That is to say, a media company must first play host to engaging memes, so that advertisers see that engagement, and are willing to pay up for ad space, leading to profitability. Thus, we have two layers of environmental selection. Whereas before, a company must play host to a good tv show, or good journalism, the game has evolved past that now.
A platform such as TikTok or Youtube, that is to say, a competitive, evolutionary, algorithmic platform, allows ideas and memes to compete as well. So instead of a select few people working to produce ideas such as writers in a TV show, or at the NYT, the work is done in a decentralized fashion. There is an internal marketplace, where memes are rewarded according to their engagement, and this produces memes that are exponentially more potent than anything that could possibly come out of somewhere where work is centralized, and rewarded according to, lets say, seniority. And then, past the internal marketplace stage, the platforms themselves compete financially, in the typical sense, trying to earn profits (eyeballs) from each other. The end result is of course network effects, with one platform emerging per use case—Twitter for microblogging, Youtube for longform, and TikTok for short form video.
Could it be possible that competition forced mainstream media to hysteria? In being forced to compete, they take on more and more engaging memes, to the detriment of quality? But instead of algorithmic rabbit holes, this takes on a shrill tone because NYT is human, rather than algorithmic, giving the sensation of people going insane? It has been said that Trump, as someone resembling a living scissor statement, has been the best thing for media ratings in a while. Isn’t it odd that the media essentially coronated him president with all the free publicity, while simultaneously hating every second of it at the individual writer level?
There is hope on the horizon in a few forms, however. Unless you can further overclock a brain (with caffeine we are already at that limit), attention is a zero-sum game. That is to say, what we are witnessing now, with the explosive growth of these online platforms, is a land grab, not an infinite expansion.
This is also an industry dominated by network effects. The forces that lead to such explosive growth, such as the scalability of info-tech, also lead to its downfall, as one or two companies dominate each niche. This means that the profitabilty component of evolution lessens its selective power, as platforms collect monopoly rents once all our attention has been accounted for.
Finally, algo-generated memes competed a little too well there for a minute. The shrillness reached its peak sometime in the past 3 years, and yet here we are, not in a civil war. The ideas were selected, in the inital expansion and takeover of memes, for pure potency and engagement, but not for accuracy or longevity. As people catch on, we will build up a societal defense immune system against purely mimetic viruses. Even now, I see many people simply detaching, having been burned thinking we were entering a societal event horizon—it turns out material reality was still dictated by material necessity, and the old powers that be are still in control, if temporarily perturbed. 4chan may still spin off a potent meme every once in a while, causing people to think that vaccines are population control, but after getting burned enough, and evading fact-checkers and censorship, people will eventually fall into habituation, and learned epistemic helplessness, back into the arms of traditional media, willing and occaisonally able to interpret things accurately…