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Greetings, friends.
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It’s not that easy to make friends anymore.
Maybe one of the reasons why is that the internet makes it’s “too easy” to create “friendship” signals. Maybe, hidden behind the visibility of a screen is actually a digital landscape of walled gardens. Maybe your real friends are somewhere beyond those walls.
Here’s some fertilizer for you to think about:
Robert Trivers' developed a theory of consciousness that dubs consciousness "the public relations agency of the brain.” According to Trivers, the conscious mind actively creates reality by selecting a group of thoughts because they paint the thinker in a positive light. This theory ties in speech, and various forms of signaling, amongst many self-promotion biases that supplant our conscious minds.
Anyone on social media today will recognize the elements of truth in this theory. Never before in human history has there been a forum as far-reaching and finely tuned to amplify the frequencies of human signaling as social media. With social media, we now have millions of human users behind screens at our fingertips. It’s a pool of potential friends in our pockets. So why is it so hard then to complete the feedback loop, to convert an abundance of friendship signals, and the connections we derive from them, into friends?
Youtube doesn’t care about how you feel. It just wants you to consume more content.
We often look at technology as a tool of influence that exists outside of us, but as digital tools become more and more integrated in daily life, we become less aware of the non-material technology that acts like a human API - the binding ingredient between human and machine. Just as HTTP is the operating protocol for the web, belonging signals are the operating protocol for our social interactions. Following the protocol will lead to predictable and desirable outcomes; breaking the protocol will lead to inaccessible websites, awkwardness, or exclusion. In all social spaces, our identity exists in a feedback loop - we feed the social algorithm with our signals and the algorithm learns to feed us more of those signals. Don’t wait for robots to show up before you start worrying about machines surpassing human design. At this point, we’ve fed the machine with so much data, the social algorithm is already smarter than any one human at what it’s designed to do.
Have you ever felt a disconnect between your real life persona and who you appear to be online?
How do you navigate the space between your online persona and your real-life one? This is a critical question, in my view, as the liminal space is where we can invite each other not only to become aware of how certain tools amplify a cognitive bias like social signaling, but how it can also degrade our common ability to form authentic bonds with each other.
If you are aware of the co-dependent relationship between your online self and the machine that helps you share that persona with other humans, try this trick I learned from Charlie Munger’s playbook: inversion.
For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s hypothesize that social media isn’t really technology, it’s just a machine. The real technology, the divinity at the altar of modern day humans, is actually humanity itself.
In reality, I think there’s more practical use for this thought experiment. Depending on your vantage point, keeping an elastic perspective on the value structure embedded in our social media can offer the potential for us to find a middle ground. Social media need not be “bad” or “good.” In fact, maybe institutionally, its useful, but at in individual level, it’s highest use isn’t yet fully expressed.
In thinking about social technology from an institutional level, one of my favorite modern day thinkers, Sam Burja points out, “when a technology is so deeply embedded in social practice, it can even survive the collapse of civilizations.” In fact, Burja further points out that social technology is an essential ingredient for society to exist at all. “But in the process of building coordination mechanisms, you can also accidentally or intentionally reduce other things, such as diversity and freedom of thought.” I would also stake a claim that social media hyperbolizes the well-studied universal decay of collective memory and attention.
So social media, a social technology application, is a mediator of complex human networking. And, like any technology, it offers at least some value, but at a cost. To find out exactly what this cost is, we need look no further than the asymmetrical results produced. For example, millions of humans use social media, with the majority drawn to the application in hopes of forming bonds with other humans. Yet many end up finding themselves caught in an inauthentic signaling feedback loop. Virtual friends, it turns out, are not the same as real ones. Individual authenticity disappears in the messy complex process of diverse humans looking for common ground. A human brain is hard-wired to optimize for signaling, which makes social technology possible, but at the systematic cost of suppressing mechanisms that enable individuals to develop and express a more integrative “authentic” sense of self. One might even argue that the fewer friends you have, the more opportunity you provide yourself to develop your authenticity. And authenticity and real friendship is a powerful feedback loop.
Will the real technology please stand up?
Building authenticity is a spiral inquiry; it allows you to expand your sense of self from an isolated identity of “me” to an fuller identity of “us” to an even deeper identity with “all of us” while remaining true to self in every context. Having a deeper capacity take self, culture, and nature to increasingly higher, wider, and deeper modes of being is what allows us to navigate the liminal space between social media and real life. Here’s my logic behind this: if we all subscribed to Fermi’s paradox, we would probably stop telling stories about aliens. I mean, if the aliens are never to be found, why would we tell stories about them and expend resources looking for them? I don’t think humans are innately wasteful with time and energy. In fact, I’d like to suggest that our friends, or aliens, are among us already. We can’t lurk in the dark forests or behind garden walls and expect to find them. To improve and positively contribute to the communities and cultures we’re a part of, we have to actively engage with ourselves and with each other and cross the dark spaces with authenticity. This is how we alter the human-machine API, and how the machine itself will learn to respond to us.