2021-02-27 ------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a series of posts. You may wish to read the other ones first: 1. "Dimensions of Government" 2. "Symmetries of Responsibility" 3. "Stacking of Thresholds" 4. "Intermingling of Structures" 5. "Examples of Alignment" 6. "Monolithic Memetics" ------------------------------------------------------------------ What do different people see when they look at Facebook? The user who goes there because their family or friends are there sees a reproduction of their social circle. It isn't a very high fidelity, though. The hierarchies that are in place in real life are flattened when they are uploaded online. The user experience is a reflection of the designer's view of the world. The user's "friends" are a large anarchic socialist pool. This is a design by someone who treats all acquintances as friends. There are no distinguishing ranks of authority. Even family members are called "friends". Maybe this design choice was made so no one would feel bad for being miscategorized into a family that has in fact disowned them etc. Maybe the hierarchies are too vague to put into words. Even in that case it reflects an anarchic view of things. It is a miscategorization made into the direction of least resistance but doesn't go far enough to remove all categorization. Facebook wants to hold hostage your "friends", not just "users". The user who is on Facebook for discussion doesn't focus on the anarchic pool, but instead the authoritarian socialist threads. There is an author who makes a claim. Often this author is some traditional authority, like the newspapers, quoted into the facebook feed. It seems to me that the discussions are sort of little gang wars, where a person stakes their claim in the beginning. Other people come in to join this person. The opposition arrives, trying to topple the local authority. The problem is, there is actually no winning this match. The first post is never edited to say "After three days of battle, I have failed to keep my ground, and should no longer be considered an authority. The new authority is my opposition." Since the battle is not going to be won in a fair way, there are all sorts of smear campaigns that can be used. These is sort of a guerilla war version of the discussion. It can be pointed out, for example, that the authority is not up to the anarchic socialist memetic standards of the day, thus not fit to stay in the discussion. Guerilla war uses environment to it's advantage, and the memetic soup that surrounds the discussions is the environment. The advertiser on facebook has written some message, being an authority in the realm of the message. They peddle with the large authoritarian capitalist system so that it tilts the field in their favor. The advertisers message is within the domain of other messages that are competing for attention, but it will be lifted higher and more visible from that cacophony. This is so far the most complex relationship I have tried to describe. So, there are these parts in it (at least): 1) Advertiser is the socialist authority of the message and discussion that will follow. 2) The message is among the large anarchic (mostly) socialist collection of messages that come through the feed. 3) The advertiser is exchanging money with facebook in authoritarian capitalist manner for advantages against unsponsored content. 4) The capitalist / socialist value of the collection of feed messages varies based on the amount of sponsored content that is allowed in. NOTE: The most interesting part of this scheme is that we can see the scalability being a real novel thing. There are no examples of this large singular domains of anarchy anywhere in real life. The Dunbar's number would make a large anarchic socialist feed an unnatural way to communicate. It should deteriorate into smaller feeds that had more authoritarian elements. Think Reddit. In the case of facebook, they are seeing the problem and are splitting the feed in authoritarian capitalist standard, creating the echo chambers probably by accident. I am not sure if I can relate enough, or know enough about the overall authoritarian capitalist structure of facebook to say much about it. I don't think that the most interesting lessons are there, since the company structure is not that different from old school Ford Motor Company style. If the company structures were to be analyzed (hopefully by a more competent person than myself), maybe Google's large anarchic socialist workforce could be of interest. It seems that Google's capitalism was in the beginning a lot more on the anarchic than authoritarian side. That's the past, though, isn't it? NOTE: It should be emphasized that my framework is always trying to categorize communication. In all the above cases the domains are about more than one person communicating with each other in different ways. If this focus is not taken into account, the categorisation might seem a bit random. Maybe "Domains of Communication" would be a good working title for this frame. ------------------------------------------------------------------