Episode two hundred and eighty is up now! Today's song is Spiral of Ants by Lemon Demon.

I discuss the song's use of the haunting imagery of an ant mill to present an open theme of endless cycles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxFu4QpdNBY

#podcast #dailypodcast #pigeon #pigeonsongspod #music #songs #spiralofants #antmill #deathspiral #lemondemon #neilcicierega #neilcic #groundhogday #timeloop #endlessloop

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about echo chambers, social networks and ant mills. I had a conversation with ChatGPT about it – if you can call it a conversation – and it told me that the equivalent of ant mills couldn’t exist in human society because humans think critically.

That seems like a hallucination. So I asked it if human critical thinking was in decline, and it gave me a list of pros and cons and did not take a side. It basically said, “You figure it out, moron, if you’re a critical thinker you should be fine.”

There seems to be an implicit assumption by large language models that we humans are smarter than we are in practice. I’m not going to say that humans are stupid, but I will say that humans do stupid things all the time and that what we call intelligence is pretty self-referential and easily gamed for the good of some.

The point, I suppose, is that ChatGPT communicates as high an opinion of humanity as humanity likes. That seems dangerous, but I’m ok with it handing out participation trophies to everyone because… well, because after some sleep, it became apparent to me that we’re all actually in the equivalent of an ant mill, except it incorporates elements of musical chairs.

Regardless of where we are on the planet these days, we are born into some culture and within some geopolitical line drawn sometime in the past, usually more than 100 years ago where 100 years is roughly 4 generations of humans. A lot changes in 100 years.

Within those geopolitical borders, there are these patterns as we grow as individuals. Education, work, procreation, death. Born into systems made generations ago in what hopefully made sense then, the systems don’t get updated too often and historians call them revolutions. Agricultural revolution. Industrial Revolution. People work less physically hard, but productivity is expected and productivity is pretty hard to define because it’s subjective. In this day and age, ‘productivity’ is almost always defined by someone else or something else.

And so we spiral around following each other, just going through the motions expected of us because to dare to think of another way would lead us from the spiral, away from where everyone else is.

People generally don’t like the spiral, so they gravitate to people they believe know a way out of the spiral and follow them, which explains why Donald Trump and Elon Musk have followers. These cults of personality persevere because the spiral sucks and, as oddball as they are, they are followed by those who hate the spirals enough that they are willing to put their own critical thought on hold because, really, the system sucks for a lot of people.

In the United States, who best represents the system? Presently, traditional Republicans and Democrats. Generations have seen what they have to offer, and that offer is at best shitty for most people, so when Trump comes along and shakes things up, the chance to get out of the spiral – however untrue – is attractive.

It seems like we’re seeing this a lot around the world. People don’t want to grind away in circles, but even the cults of personality that seem so attractive to some are just different spirals. All that needs to happen, really, is people stop following each other around and using their own critical thought – at least according to a generative artificial intelligence that thinks highly of we humans because we told it that it should.

We aren’t lost. We know exactly where we are because we’ve seen it all before on the last revolution, and it’s going to take more than funky hairstyles, speaking styles, and gravitas to get beyond it. It’s going to require substance, and just like the ant mill, all we have to do is be willing to blaze a new trail.

Now go off and think critically to help us get out of this spiral.

https://realityfragments.com/2024/04/12/the-social-spiral/

#antMill #Culture #humanity #life #perspective #society #writing

There’s been an ant mill, sometimes called a death spiral, that had gone viral on social media some time ago. It’s a real thing.

Army ants follow by pheromones, and if they get separated from the main group, they can end up following each other in circles until they either find a path out or die of exhaustion.

It’s mesmerizing to watch. It’s almost like they’re being held in orbit by something like gravity, but that’s not the case. They’re just lost ants, going in circles.

I’ve seen enough things on the Internet come and go to see a sort of commonality.

It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for echo chambers in social media. Social media isn’t just singular echo chambers, the echo chambers are based on attributes.

If you like, as an example, dogs, you can get into an echo chamber of dog memes. If you also happen to like cats – it is possible to like both – you can get into an echo chamber of cat memes. These are pretty benign echo chambers, but when you start seeing the same memes over and over, you can be pretty sure that echo chamber is in a spiral. You lose interest. You leave, finding a different ‘pheromone trail’ to follow or just… taking a hard right when everyone is going left.

With centralized social networks such as Facebook or Twitter X, algorithms feed these echo chambers that connect people. When those echo chambers become stale, the connections with others within the echo chamber remain and before you know it you have the equivalent of an ant mill of humans in a social network. To stay in that echo chamber, critical thinking is ignored and confirmation biases are fed.

This also accelerates when the people who provide content to the echo chambers – the pheromones, if you will – leave. Some might follow them elsewhere, but the inertia keeps many there until… well, until they’re exhausted.

This seems a logical conclusion to the algorithmic display of content, or promoting certain posts all the time in search results.

Do you find yourself using the same apps, doing the same things over and over with diminishing returns of happiness (assuming there is happiness in your echo chamber)? Does it seem like you’ve seen that meme before?

You might be in a spiral.

Get out. Don’t die sniffing someone else’s posterior.

https://knowprose.com/2024/04/11/echo-chambers-ant-mills-and-social-networks/

#antMill #behavior #boredom #culture #echoChamber #socialMedia #socialNetwork #society