If we’ve learned anything about technology over the last few decades, it’s that we don’t prepare for the downsides until the problems are so egregious, we can’t ignore them. The obvious example is social media, which was hailed as utopian when it first arrived, but is now widely considered to be a destructive and destabilizing force in society that can amplify misinformation, hate, harassments and polarization. It took over a decade for the harms to really sink in, but these days more than 65% of Americans believe social media has a mostly negative effect on our world.
Of course, there’s nothing about the technology itself that creates these problems. It’s the business models behind social media drives platforms to mediate information flow across society, filtering and amplifying content in ways that distort our thinking. This is a form of mind control and it’s about to get much MUCH worse.