Humanity vs. The Algorithm: Why Bots Shouldn’t Write Our Future | Shimmy Says Ep. 48

Hey everyone, it's shimmy, and welcome to this week's shimmy sets. You know, there's a good one. I want you to pay attention if you can.

Um, I call it why we can't have nice things because the algorithms won't let us. That's why. Look, I don't care how smart you are, whether you consider yourself woke, woke, adjacent, adjacent, anti woke or whatever, whatever you want to call yourself, something is fundamentally wrong in our digital world.

Stuff's gone off the rails. Now I'm not, and I'm not talking about your aunt posting her Q anon memes again, I'm talking about the underlying guts, the systems that really are deciding what we see, who we hear it from, and it leads to what we believe. You know, we used to live in a world where influence meant you said something that was really smart, compelling, valuable people listened because they believed it, they trusted it.

Today, we don't have that today. Influence means you figured out how to gain the algorithm. There's that word algorithm who controls the algorithm?

Some shadowy group of tech bros out in Silicon Valley. Maybe the government, maybe other governments, maybe who El Chapo, who the hell knows? We don't know.

But what we do know is that the algorithms are controlling what we see, what we feel, and ultimately what we believe. And if you could hack the feed, if you could gain the algorithm, if you get bots to clap for you on command, you get machines to elevate you above actual ha humans, you become viral. Guys, that's influence today, but it's not.

It's digital puppetry. I call this the dictatorship of the algorithm. That's the era we live in.

As an example of this, I wanted to bring up a recent, uh, two stories on Politico about how automated bots evidently boosted Nicki Mina's political posts on social media. They estimate about 18 or 19,000 bots working in concert were enough to make her go viral and then have this whole kind of media, uh, machine pick it up. And these were done by bots, not because humans were ignited by her message or got excited, not because the groundswell of everyday people suddenly changed their minds.

No, it was bots and they played the algorithms and the algorithm algorithmic systems elevated her content in the visibility and it went viral and it took off. That right there is the modern definition of influence, not mass thought, not even m********e, debate or merit. It's all about bots and algorithms.

I don't know about you, but it terrifies the heck outta me. These algorithms are turning us into sheep and lemmings. This story isn't about Nicki Mina's celebrity.

It's not about partisanship or politics even. It's about mechanics, systems, incentives, the architecture of influence, if you will. This stuff really doesn't respect left or right, Republicans or Democrat, none of them own it.

The the algorithms almost exist independently of it. It's respect. It respects only what gets engagement and then it rigs the game around that engagement.

It's, this is the structural mechanics of the digital world we now live in. And in many ways that's controlling us. Now, you might think bots are just spammy accounts or fake profiles that occasionally post nonsense.

But you know what? That's not what the research shows. The research shows that bots are everywhere in the social landscape, and they're not random noise.

You know, Elon Musk was moaning and groaning about bots before he took over Twitter. It's only gotten worse in multiple studies. Bots have been shown to shape political conversations guide what's trending and actually alter what human users see and engage with.

In Brazil's election cycles, for instance, bot networks were found to push narrow agenda points that didn't really reflect the messy variety of, of the real, the reality of public opinion there in Canada. Bot posts skewed what topics showed up in the political feeds that people were seeing. Guys, this is no longer marginal.

It's highly impactful and it's happening now to us, to you, to everyone. Some researchers are even warning that the autonomous ai bot swarm coordinated networks of intelligent accounts, they're being used to manipulate, manipulate public opinion at a scale we've not seen before. And it's only growing for future elections.

Guys, this isn't some dystopian hypothesis I'm throwing out at you. It's a plan that's already underway and is being used against us. And, and I I'm not making this up.

I'm getting it from a whole bunch of sources. The guardian and uh, and bunch of of of different sources here. So what is this telling us?

It's telling us that influence is no longer about ideas. It's about who can gain the system best, who plays their algorithms. You know, a few years ago if you had something worth saying, you said it and people either listened or they did it.

It was human judgment. Was it common sense? But now your idea has to see survive a triage by the algorithms, by software to decide whether or not you're gonna maximize your engagement.

I don't care if you're talking about Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or any of them. It's all the same engagement. And therefore, influence and importance is measured by clicks and conversions and spikes in traction.

Algorithmic, algorithmic recommendation scores, trending metrics. It has nothing to do with truth, nothing to do with substance, nothing to do with nuance. What gets rewarded today is loudness.

Outrage, polarizing takes CIA esias headlines, content engineered to trigger shock or bait for attention. Nothing to do, as I say with wisdom. Nothing to do with reason.

Debate, nothing to do with depth. We don't have any depth, depth. Let me say it again for you though.

Engagement is not the same thing as value. Algorithm doesn't care about truth, it cares about engagement. So while we're outsourcing our collective attention to software that doesn't care about us, let that sink in only about what keeps eyeballs locked on signals that can be monetized.

Let's really look at what it does to our society. If everyone is shouting for clicks and the algorithm rewards the loudest voices, then what gets the most oxygen? Figure it out.

It's not insight, it's not common ground. It's not empathy. No.

The algorithm promotes chaos, conflict, amplifying division. This isn't accidental. It's structural to the algorithms.

You've seen it. Even if you don't know why it feels this way. You feel like we're just not together.

Everybody's in their own corners. You scroll, you react, you feel like you're choosing, but you're not. You're being played.

The truth is the system is optimizing what you see. Selecting, prioritizing, distorting it. This isn't about freedom and speech or free conversations.

It's not democratic discourse. And everyone has an opinion. It's al aga algorithmic steering.

It's the algorithm steering us like we're lemming and sheep. And the point that most people are missing is this isn't about just politics. Yeah, it's in the political story I spoke about with Nicki Minaj today.

And it links to right wing messaging. But you wanna know the truth. Bots don't give a s**t about right wing, left wing, left wing or what your in ideology is.

They only care about manipulating the algorithm to manipulate you. They are tools. They're getting tools that are getting picked up by every side to manipulate you.

Corporations are using them to push products. Political campaigns are using them to gain their reach. Interest groups are using them to amplify outrage.

Foreign actors are using them to so discord. This isn't left or right, it's mechanics, but we don't even know who sits behind them. We know who's using them.

We don't know who sits behind them. So when we talk about something like I spoke about last week, the in notification of the internet, as Corey Doctoral puts it, we're talking about this degradation of the structure of the internet, of the digital landscape. The internet was a tool originally for connection and discovery, but now it's optimized as Tim Mu says, for extraction of attention, of emotions, of belief systems.

As I said, you heard me talk about this before, I spoke about it last week a bit. The extraction of our data, our privacy, and yes, our beliefs. Tim W's point about how digital architectures are warping social norms and expectation.

It used to be we had humans deciding what to share a buyer think, and it was based on their own judgment. But now sh system is shaped by software whose only really interest is keeping us in the loof, keeping us doom, scrolling, keeping us clicking. And that just doesn't distort disco discourse, guys, it discourse, it warps, it literally warps reality.

When bots and algorithms flood a conversation and make something seem like a consensus, people assume it's representative. We haven't learned better. They think, look at all these shares.

Look at all these likes. People must believe this. It must be true.

But those signals can be manufactured, they could be engineered, and that engineering has consequences. And the insidious parties, then we start thinking everything's engineered and we don't know what's truth and what's not truth. This is what happens when public policy debates are decided not by deliberation or reasoned argument, not even by voters weighing options, but by what software decided what was trending.

And as much as we may try to kick that trend and go with the antit trend, we're just playing back into the algorithm. Guys. This isn't democracy, this isn't free rule.

This is a digital mob being ruled by design, by optimization. We are living in a era where a handful of proprietary algorithms have more influence on public thought and public perceptions than any editorial board in history ever did. It's astonishing and it's also frightening.

Now, I know I hear some people say, but this is just the price we pay for having this great technology. We can't expect perfection. Come on guys, that's weak.

It's weak sauce. We should expect better. We have to demand better because influence should come from humans, not machines.

This isn't some running man movie or something. Our beliefs and opinions should be shaped by reason, by evidence, by real conversation, by facts. Not just opinion, not by code that only cares about how much time we spend on a page.

Let me talk about finding bots, detecting bot bots. 'cause that's an important first step. Companies like cyber, the company involved in that Minaj case and others like them, they're doing god's work here.

It's really valuable identifying these bot networks. We so need this visibility, but detection alone won't solve the root of the problem. 'cause again, I'm gonna come back to it.

The real issue is the algorithms that prioritize what you see must be redesigned to serve human interest. Not to manipulate us, not just engagement metrics. We need in our algorithms and bots, transparency in how these feeds are coming onto our screens.

Accountability by the people who run these platforms that allow this manipulation to go on regulation that treats these symptoms as the infrastructure utilities. That they are standards that define what's acceptable algorithmic behavior and what looks like in the democratic society. But to make all this happen, that means we need political will.

That means pushing back against companies that profit from this engagement in the algorithm arms race. That means citizens speaking up and saying, we want platforms that reflect us, not the machines that manipulate us. Most politicians, brand influences, they're comfortable playing the algorithm game.

I said it, they're gaming it themselves. They love the reach, they love the impression counts. They love the the influence, they love the click metrics.

They love the manufactured consensus. Again, the Minaj case is a perfect example. The company that did the research said there's like in an 85% chance that these 18 or 19,000 bots drove the algorithms to elevate her profile into the stratosphere to show how politicized and crazy this stuff is.

Shortly after the article published, a fight broke out online with no less than the US ambassador to the United Nations weighing in to defend minaj and the validity of her influencer status on why people love her on social media. You could ask yourself, I did. What the hell is the ambassador from the United States to the United Nations doing, being involved in this?

But that's the reach and power of the algorithms. They control everything. They're pulling the levers.

You know, on this point, uh, my Textron gang, or not my Textron gang, my Textron AV team worked up another little AI synthetic music video about the whole Minaj affair. Uh, this one in, in, in homage to Nicki Minaj is a rap video, but explains the gaming of the algorithms. I hope you enjoy it.

We're gonna play it at the end of this episode. But if you think that these algorithms are good for society, you're kidding yourself, man. Because when machine optimization becomes the arbiter of truth, the result is an environment where opinion is cheap, outrageous currency and nuance is extinct.

Guys, this is not a tech problem. This is a civilization problem. You wanna know why you can't have nice things.

Why the internet is, is the ification of the internet because the machines are winning. They're running the show and we're letting them. Here's the bottom line.

If you want a world where humans influence ideas, policies and power, then we have to rest control back from the systems and algorithms that have hijacked it. We have to insist on transparency. We have to demand accountability.

We have to build systems that reward truth, not noise. Because until we do that, we're living in a world where influence is not democratic. It's not fair.

It's a algorithmic. And that my friends is not how human society was meant to be. We deserve better.

I'm shimmy. See you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

With prime time headline blades, headline from Dbo charts to political ways. Now they talking numbers say, mama mentions ain't pure Isiah spreadsheet. Politico.

Sure. 18,000 shadows in the common parade who foul picks blank, but the praise gets sprayed. The message boosted on Q flash.

Everybody got a view timeline controversy hot. Is it real Barb love or an army Barb? Play the algorithms like a fool on string.

Turn the code into a crown. Race to the top. Rally cry.

Call research bias. The outrage fly. Say it's just supporters, not some phantom brigade, but half those handles were born yesterday.

Spike engagement went wild. Same phrasing. Copy pasted profile.

When politics meet fandom in the digital dual box switch and score the algorithm like a fool. Well, welcome to the matrix where perception is king. If you trend for now you can swing anything organic, artificially grown.

Doesn't matter if the narrative day echo chamber coll by the trending tides, all believers, your own rule. Somebody out playing like a fool.