[afiodorov]

We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.

[alganet]

> disengagement.

That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.

> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people

That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".

> People are feeling the manipulation

They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it.

---

How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it?

Those are the interesting questions.

[afiodorov]

There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement.

If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Those are the interesting questions.

Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.

The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.

[Levitating]

> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people

>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".

The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.

It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.

I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.

[notarobot123]

The Algorithm doesn't care if you're illegible. How ever much you mess with it, you're still its plaything.

[__MatrixMan__]

> How far can you game a profiling algorithm?

I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.

[spacemadness]

Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.

[jagrsw]

> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.

Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.

  Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the
  time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The
  expected revenue for this group over a longer period
  and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the
  average user.

  Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at
  least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices
  increased only within the first three hours.

Hope this helps :)

[praptak]

You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.

[afiodorov]

Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.

An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.

We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.

What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.

[vdupras]

Of course you can disengage, and very effectively: spend less, work less. Touch grass. It's called Asceticism and is as old as Philosophy.

[somedude895]

The most exploitative and unfree societies are and always have been the ones that rejected the free market.

[genewitch]

they'll just go after the elusive "disengagement dollar"

watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)

[burnt-resistor]

I've long since checked out (2012) from social media and apps that commodify and monetize every little aspect of life.

[whilenot-dev]

> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.

It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.

So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.

We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?

There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...

[9dev]

You can spell out "fuck" here, we’re all adults. And the president does it on live TV too!