[api]

... as is its doppelgänger, the "red pill" or "manosphere" or "alt-right" or whatever it's called this week crowd. Other side, same coin.

The other day I came up with a dorky acronym for social media and what it does: the CRASER. CRASER stands for Craziness Amplification through Stimulation of Engagement with Reactivity.

The idea is that primitive emotions like fear, hate, anger, outrage, etc. are the things that drive engagement. In other words: emotional reactivity. We've programmed computers to moderate our discourse with the goal function of driving engagement, so they selectively amplify signals that push those buttons. The result is a craziness laser that is causing everyone to adopt increasingly extreme, irrational, and provocative belief systems and styles of expression. Like in a laser all the various forms of madness feed on each other and intensify each other.

In the end there will only be Nazis advocating a new holocaust, Neo-Leninists advocating new gulags, and people who just hate everyone equally and want to destroy the world for the lulz.

For what it's worth I remember the early Internet too and in my memory it all really started to go to hell when gasified social media appeared: algorithmic timelines, up/down votes, likes, etc. That's when the CRASER fired up.