You never, ever want to be on Jordan Peterson's bad side, buckos.
This guy teaches people how to slay dragons, for heaven's sake.
This right here is an intellectual takedown of the cesspool that is Twitter in 13 brutal minutes where Dr. Peterson punches the site to the ground and keeps kicking and kicking until it's dead.
(If you don't have time to watch, some quotes follow)
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- Use of certain forms of social media, particularly by girls just entering adolescence, was directly and causally associated with greater and higher rates of depression and depression-related symptoms; since the early- to mid-2010s.
- [Twitter] bypasses the traditional way of measuring the quality of communication.
- Too often, therefore, the median stimulates a reactive rage as it denies, even to competent users, two of the main privileges traditionally granted to them: The presumption of innocence and the right and ability to engage in effective self-defense. The mob can say anything at all about you or your thoughts online, despite your hard-earned reputation, and there is nothing you can do about it.
- Perhaps more worrisome of all is the fact that this incited rage bleeds over into the real world. All the impotent anger generated is externalized away from the social network and dispersed. Thus, the ambient emotional temperature of general society is raised degree by degree to the boiling point.
- I believe that Twitter's reward structure – even more than Facebook's – incentivizes malignant narcissism. It enables and benefits free riding and prioritizes psychopathic motivation. And it garners disproportionate attention in doing so, capitalizing on the attractiveness of outrageous behavior while externalizing all the associated and inevitable costs to the innocent broader society. This is the psychological equivalent of the Tragedy of the Commons; the psychological equivalent to pollution of the air we all breathe.
- Have we built so-called 'communication' systems that are capable of destabilizing our entire society? [Jonathan] Haidt believes it was the mere introduction of the retweet and like buttons that facilitated the tit-for-tat sharing of emotionally triggering content, particularly that capable of generating outrage. If a tech innovation can exaggerate polarization on a societal scale, how much disruption can these communication technologies taken as a whole create? Enough to bring us down? The mental health data already indicate that a major toll has been taken on female adolescents. What about the rest of us? What about our social institutions?
JP, y'all!
Most importantly, Peterson is calling for serious research into the dangers of these platforms and their monopoly over our emotions (and thus our society). Considering his influence, I wouldn't be surprised if such research leads to serious pushback to Big Tech in coming years.
He might not be able to take Twitter down, but he's unleashing an army of professionals, intellectuals, scientists, and parents against the platform. Get ready for the next level of socio-cultural warfare.
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