Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator

Last update: 08 Dec 2024 00:05
First version: 25 June 2023

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I can't remember if Henry Farrell came up with this phrase, or I did, as the title for one of our slow-growing joint projects. (As always, I am the rate-limiting factor.) I also forget whether we originally meant Monster's, singular, or Monsters', plural; as time passes I lean towards the latter.

The thesis for the project, briefly stated and grossly over-simplified, is that all of us who had happy thoughts c. 1995--2015 about how the Internet could unleash human creativity were, in fact, completely right. It could, and in fact it did. But in our optimism we forgot that "to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks", i.e., that human creativity is mostly mad. Moreover: we were also right about how the Internet was going to facilitate certain kinds of collective action. But when you put all that together... In other words, a lot of what we have come to deplore about online life, and the way it has changed life-in-general, was more or less built in from the beginning.

At some point, I hope we will, in fact, write this all up properly. In the meanwhile, the first fruits is our piece in (of all places) the Communications of the ACM.

See also:
• My blog posts with this tag
• My bookmarks with this tag
• Collective Cognition
• Computer Networks
• The Information Society and the Information Economy
• Mass Hysteria, Mass Panics, Contagious Mental Conditions
• Networks as Provinces of the Commonwealth of Letters
• Psychoceramics
• Recommender Systems and Collaborative Filtering
• Social Contagion, Information Cascades, Diffusion of Innovations, Etc.
• Social Networks
• Text Mining and Information Retrieval

Grist for this particular mill (needs amplification, sorting, etc.):
• Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
• Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason
• Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
• Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterial Epidemics and Modern Media
• Francesca Bolla Tripodi, "Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices", Data and Society (2018)
• Daniel Williams, "The Marketplace of Rationalizations", Economics and Philosophy 39 (2023): 99--123

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• Henry Farrell and CRS, "Bias, Skew and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity", Communications of the ACM 67:4 (2024): 25--28

To read:
• David Auerbach, Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities
• Michele Avalle, Niccolò Di Marco, Gabriele Etta, Emanuele Sangiorgio, Shayan Alipour, Anita Bonetti, Lorenzo Alvisi, Antonio Scala, Andrea Baronchelli, Matteo Cinelli and Walter Quattrociocchi , "Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time", Nature forthcoming (2024) [I will be interested to see how they measure "toxicity"; I realize that Henry and I used that word, but not very formally...]
• Levin Brinkmann, Fabian Baumann, Jean-François Bonnefon, Maxime Derex, Thomas F. Müller, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Agnieszka Czaplicka, Alberto Acerbi, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joseph Henrich, Joel Z. Leibo, Richard McElreath, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Jonathan Stray and Iyad Rahwan, "Machine culture", Nature Human Behavior 7 (2023): 1855--1868
• Rogers Brubaker, Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents
• Elena Esposito, Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence
• N. F. Johnson, N. Velasquez, N. Johnson Restrepo, R. Leahy, R. Sear, N. Gabriel, H. Larson, Y. Lupu, "Mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and misinformation", arxiv:2102.02382
• Matthew Motta, Juwon Hwang, and Dominik Stecula, "What Goes Down Must Come Up? Misinformation Search Behavior During an Unplanned Facebook Outage", osf/ea6jk
• Susanna Paasonen, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media
• Walter Scheirer, A History of Fake Things on the Internet
• Francesca Bolla Tripodi, The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy
• Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, " Global Village or Cyber-Balkans? Modeling and Measuring the Integration of Electronic Communities", Management Science 51 (2005): 851--868 [Thanks to Prof. Van Alstyne for the pointer. (Received by the journal 1999, which tells me there is a story...) JSTOR]

To write:
• Henry Farrell and CRS, Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator