What the Quaker silence practice (amongst others) may counter is the always common human snare of responding not to the world, but to our overlearned internal chatter about it: an always-on autopilot. Twitter has externalised this, so what was previously burned into individual brains is now distributed amongst millions.
A social media advance would require some collective equivalent of that silence practice, something creating a bias towards curiously asking questions of the world, rather than parroting jointly practised accusations and answers. I don't know what could do that, because it's an ethic, not merely a procedure.
For individuals, getting off things like Twitter is a prerequisite for freedom.
Something that clicked for me while reading this article: ChatGPT means that a person can write faster than they can read.
Over the past fifty years, technology and the internet have made it increasingly easy to produce content. And on the whole, looking back, I'd say that has been a net negative. Because our "attention", as the article puts it, is a limited resource, and the world today has too much noise and not enough signal. And that's the world before ChatGPT.
We are now at the point where producing content is easier than consuming content. That has never happened before in all of human history. And humanity is clearly not ready.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadSeems about right.
A social media advance would require some collective equivalent of that silence practice, something creating a bias towards curiously asking questions of the world, rather than parroting jointly practised accusations and answers. I don't know what could do that, because it's an ethic, not merely a procedure.
For individuals, getting off things like Twitter is a prerequisite for freedom.
Over the past fifty years, technology and the internet have made it increasingly easy to produce content. And on the whole, looking back, I'd say that has been a net negative. Because our "attention", as the article puts it, is a limited resource, and the world today has too much noise and not enough signal. And that's the world before ChatGPT.
We are now at the point where producing content is easier than consuming content. That has never happened before in all of human history. And humanity is clearly not ready.