On Facebook

        Sometimes I contemplate about the future of our society and I often end up imagining a scenario where Facebook controls everything, from individual psychological choices to society to economics to politics.

    Facebook's algorithm could decide which form of society to enforce on a given geography. They simulate it first on socially intelligent robot agents and then implement the best chosen model on a particular geography according to how they want to organize it. A psychological ruling over people! It’s like magic, but it isn’t. It’s what happens when you integrate computer science, psychology, social sciences and computer devices distributed all over the world. We're heading towards a point where society cannot function without Facebook.

      Our every prejudices, feelings, sense of standards, IQ, insecurities, personality traits, preferences, fears, what we like, dislike etc., it’s all there, in datasets. The rest is determined by that: which page's posts appear on our feed, who we see, who we stalk, whose opinion we seek the most, which ones are our closest friends, whose likes/comments we anticipate the most on our posts etc. It can make two people closer by recommending same things, can make two people have dissimilar views by recommending dissimilar posts. It can also make two people lose interest over time. They have information about our personality traits, which in turn control our emotions, character and our worldview (including our political tendencies). Facebook has information and insight about our social structures on multiple levels. And it's not that they'll use our data against us or sell it. They'll improve their algorithm with it and make it more addicting.   

    If they choose, or if any sufficiently large external entity with power chooses (which can buy political powers/which can be bought by political powers), they can then, legally, control a group of local citizens' worldview and even cause civil wars, by recommending newsfeed posts which radicalizes people [1], or cause events which might lead to one.

    Instagram takes it even further, in terms of data collected, masked by a more elegant UI with lesser controls. But let’s leave Instagram for another time.

     In the future, it might even be possible to predict a person’s whole life. Because given enough data on multiple dimensions, I don't see it as impossible, and facebook has the power to possess it.(let's leave Google and the US government out for now)

    And it's not like the case with telephone calls, which radically transformed society and businesses, where our voice data, contact information and geographical information are the only things that can be used by the service provider. Plus, they didn't even have the storage to store all that and the power to process it back then. It's different now. We have the power of cloud, faster computers (on both sides, which get faster every year [2] ) , bigger storage with faster R/W speed, faster bandwidth and more advanced computer science to manipulate data than ever before. And we have Artificial Intelligence to do complex tasks like classification, labeling etc. of massive datasets (and tons of other things of course, depending on the type of data) and AI does it with human level accuracy and sometimes even better than humans. 

    Here in Nepal, it’s as if we have two worlds. One, physical, which is crappy and boring, with muddy roads, and another, digital, where everyone is beautiful and everything is good and ideal, where we get to see people do more interesting things than us. And we’re liking the digital world more! We like it when someone imitates western culture, we call them progressive, but let's not go there now. I'm also not going into the impact that the internet will bring on our cultures, religions, politics and on the worldview of the new generation.

    If the lockdown extends more and more, if they don’t find a cure, then everything will be done online. It’ll be a digital world, and our society will be through Facebook. It will be a world where software companies control everything. Our country's businesses will have a hard time competing with them, because theirs' will be faster, free of cost and with more features. 

    And it’s addicting af, we will never be able to leave it now. It’s too late. If we leave it, our mental health will start to deteriorate. We'll lose friends. Our sense of reality will become changed (if you ever have the courage to leave it permanently). We may end up in rehab. But it's not entirely impossible though.

     But why would you ever want to leave it? It’s addicting, they keep adding new features, new camera filters, you can play games, you can look into other people's lives, you can stalk other people without them knowing (take that, linkedin premium), you can meet new people, connect instantly, it has funny memes, you can text your girlfriend! A short term dopamine rush of people liking your posts!! People commenting and flattering you about how good you look!!  Woooh!!! Everyone will be happy! Careers will get born out of it. They'll start competing over statistical data like followers, the amount of likes etc. There will be hierarchies within it. They'll start updating their profile pictures. They'll get insecure about their body parts. They'll delete posts in which they didn't look good. Their own social cubicle of 300 people! Cultures will start to emerge out of it. People will start becoming fans of those with more followers. They'll feel inferior because they've got less followers than the other person. They'll start calculating people's worth based on their profile. They'll get angry because a person didn't follow them back. They'll start wondering why they didn't get a follow back. They'll find their life partner through facebook!  

        People "influencing" people.

    And pretty soon your whole life will start depending on it and you’ll be compelled to use it, kinda like a bourgeois threat of bread (literally, because businesses will be done on facebook/IG). And with that, they'll rule over us psychologically. They'll take our privacy from us, and in return, they'll provide us with happiness. They'll do it in the name of connecting people together. Everyone will believe in it. Everyone will be fooled. They'll prefer getting fooled, because 'reality is often disappointing'. 

        It’s a gradual change, not visible at first to a layman, but it’s happening, and it’s growing every day. 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."